The Stars Still Shine: PLEASE Read and Review!
by Lyght
Summary: On a routine mission to Vulcan, one man is forced to grapple with his worst enemy--himself. Please leave reviews! Rated PG-13 for some harsh language.
1. Author's Note

This is one of the multi-part stories I wrote for a Star Trek ficboard a few months back. I'm pretty proud of it, so I'll risk posting it here and see what y'all think.  
  
Back story.  
  
The Imperials, a faction of the mirror universe, have invaded the Federation and laid waste to everything in their path. Their primary weapon, the Genesis torpedo, is capable of destroying a planet and rearranging matter at the quantum level--essentially, Creation in six seconds.  
  
At a critical battle, S'Tasik, Harriman, Smithy, Beddoes, and Forester manage to stem the Imperial advance and destroy their fleet. However, S'Tasik's mirror counterpart escapes with one intact torpedo remaining and sets a course for Vulcan.  
  
S'Tasik and the Peacekeeper set a course for the system, where his mirror confronts him on the Dunes of Surak. S'Tasik sacrifices himself to buy the time necessary to save his ship, and Forester arrives just moments too late to save his friend from destruction.  
  
He resolves to travel back in time and retrieve his friend's katra, or soul. His science officer recommends that the ship's phase cloak be engaged to minimize damage to the timeline; Forester reluctantly agrees. He transports onto the Peacekeeper two days before the battle and completes his mission successfully.  
  
Now, Forester is en route to the Vulcan star system, where his friend's soul is to be buried for eternity... 


	2. Part I

=/\= Part I =/\=  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, En Route to System Vulcan  
Sickbay  
1300 Hours   
  
Admiral Kieran Forester was your typical admiral in so many ways.  
  
He had command of a powerful ship crewed by some of the brightest men, women, and asexuals and staffed by the most capable officers that he could get his hands upon. None of the bridge crew had had less than twenty years of experience, and all of them were, to him, not only officers but friends. He had fought in countless engagements, made a name for himself throughout Starfleet as a man with soft words and a very large stick, and even could get away with disobeying orders once in a while without a peep from the higher echelons of the service.  
  
And, like all admirals in Starfleet, he was absolutely positively terrified of his monthly physical.  
  
"Come on, Caitlin," Kieran pleaded. "I'm doing all of the exercises you told me to do and more and you still want to scan me with those unholy instruments you have?"  
  
The steely-eyed CMO didn't answer, dragging him towards the lift and the horrors of the hypospray.  
  
Kieran tried again. "But Caitlin--"  
  
"Look," she said, rounding on him. "You may be the CO and all but it's my duty to see whether you're fit for duty. So if you don't want to go to Sickbay, then fine. I'll have no choice but to contact Starfleet Command and tell them that a particular admiral is no longer competent and ought to be sent to a desk--"  
"But Caitlin--"  
  
"It's for your own good. Now get your geriatric ass down here or I'll stun you and carry you myself."  
  
"Why do I tolerate this?" Kieran asked plaintively, following her meekly like a whipped dog. "I could relieve you of duty, you know, and assign you to a medical frigate."  
  
"Because I'm the best damn doctor in all of the Fifth Fleet and you know it. And, may I remind you, I would have been much happier at the Xenobiology Institute if not for you."  
  
"Sometimes my stupidity amazes even myself."  
  
"Stop getting all self-piteous on me and get onto the bed. And stay there while I find my tricorder."  
  
Kieran sighed and lay down obediently, wincing a bit as his knee almost gave out from under him. "Dammit, I hate getting old."  
  
"What was that?" asked the doctor.  
  
"Dammit, I hate getting a cold."  
  
"Don't we all," said Caitlin, passing a block of beeping metal over his body.  
  
"What's that?"  
  
"Concussion grenade." She laughed as Kieran tried to bolt out of the cot. "It's a tricorder, what do you think it is?"  
  
An orderly cleaning the floor a few beds away started laughing too until the admiral gave him a baleful look. "You're rubbing off on them, Caitlin, you know that? Any more of this and I'll be commanding a ship of madmen--ow!"  
  
While he was talking the doctor had jammed a needle into his arm and was now studying his blood.  
  
"Whatever happened to non-invasive procedures?"  
  
The CMO set down her hypospray and helped the admiral get up. "Looks like you're perfectly normal," she said finally. "You can go get drunk now."  
  
The orderly almost started sniggering again but stopped at the expression on Kieran's face.  
  
"Like I needed you to tell me that," muttered the admiral as he stalked out of Sickbay.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Ffestinog, Holding Escort Position  
Bridge  
1425 Hours  
  
Every so often, when the latest batch of graduates got their stripes, Starfleet would pull a few starships out of duty at the front and use them for training purposes, replacing some of their crew with new officers. Supposedly, experience in the field helped them refine their skills and give them insights into whatever they chose to do, something which couldn't be gained at the helm of a simulator. Starfleet reasons notwithstanding, however, Captain Jason Beddoes thought the whole idea was nothing more than a nuisance.  
  
The lift doors slid open as he stepped onto the bridge of his ship. "No need to salute," he said as half of his officers leapt up from their chairs looking for all the world like cadets fresh out of the Academy, which, he had to remind himself, they actually were. "I don't mind."  
  
All the same, none of them seemed in any hurry to relax.  
  
The captain shrugged and turned to his interim science officer. "Mr. Horthy, anything new showing up on scanners?"  
  
"Nothing, sir!" Dammit, Beddoes swore to himself, he sounds like he's talking to a drill sergeant. "We're picking up the usual background radiation, sir, and of course the Hyperion, sir, but other than that, sir, there is nothing worth reporting. Sir."  
  
Captain Beddoes heaved a sigh. "Boring as usual. Call me if anything comes up," he said. "I'm going to go change."  
  
"For what?" asked his helm officer, who was quite experienced. Apparently Starfleet didn't trust fresh officers to fly real starships safely.  
  
"Birthday meal." Beddoes gestured towards the Hyperion.  
  
"With the admiral?" chorused the cadets almost as one.  
  
"Yes," he said. "With the admiral." A starry-eyed officer looked at him expectantly. "And--" Beddoes cringed. "I'll get you his autograph too."  
  
The rookie positively beamed.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, En Route to System Vulcan  
Transporter Room 10  
1620 Hours  
  
Three hours later, Admiral Forester thanked his lucky stars that he had remembered to go to his physical. It would have been quite embarrassing if the CMO had had to drag him away from dinner. And dinner tonight was a special affair.  
  
"Welcome aboard and happy birthday," he said warmly as Captain Beddoes stepped down from the transporter platform. "It's been quite a while. I see you're still whole after spending a few months with those trainees?"  
  
"You don't look too bad yourself," replied the captain, grinning. "I've heard that Denning of yours has an iron fist."  
  
"That's probably why she's single." Kieran rubbed his arm where his CMO had stabbed it. "Too bad."  
  
"Speaking of which, how's Alexandria doing?"  
  
The admiral smiled fondly. "She's still commanding the Valiant, ferrying some diplomats to Andoria, and bitching all the way. She either wants to live in our little house on Dantar or be stationed at DS9 for a bit and blow the living daylights out of the Dominion."  
  
"Full of contradictions, hmm?"  
  
Kieran was about to defend his wife of god-knows-how-many-years when he was interrupted by the beeping of his communicator. "I'll save the lecture for later, Jason--Kieran here."  
  
"Where are you!" the voice on the other end said in annoyance. "I got Boris and Dane all dressed up as butlers and cooked all the food and you have to be late--"   
  
"I'll be right there, Caitlin. Kieran out."  
  
"Boris and Dane dressed up as butlers, huh?" Beddoes was impressed. It wasn't often that an irate Russian engineer and a bulky Norwegian first officer were forced into tails.  
  
"They should have just called her Margaret Thatcher and made it all obvious," said Kieran. "Come on, I don't want her to chew me up any more." The two men laughed and walked out of the room.  
  
  
Officer's Mess  
1800 Hours  
  
Dinner was usually fantastic whenever Caitlin Denning was cooking and tonight was no exception. After the senior staff had gotten a few chuckles at the two red-faced waiters, the CMO had brought in the first course, a recipe which she had picked up during her travels in Mexico.  
  
"It's called a flameado," she said, pouring copious amounts of alcohol on top of a sizzling mixture of cheese, shrimp, peppers, and other items. "You stew it, then light it." Without another word of warning she flicked on a lighter and the entire dish burst into a brilliant blue flame.  
  
Boris Kurchatov, the chief engineer, was especially enthusiastic, helping himself to more than a few tortillas. "Like borscht but better," he said through a large mouthful, dripping cheese onto his tie.  
  
After that came a few off-world delicacies, a large oven-baked turkey complete with stuffing and cranberry sauce, and then the cherries jubilee, a dessert which also involved lighting the dish on fire. At the end of the meal nobody could complain of not being full.  
  
"So anyways," said Dane Kjolgaard, taking another mouthful of a poisonous mixture of Saurian brandy and sounding rather inebriated, "there I was, in the Klingon prison camp, and what do you know, they recognize who I am. So they lock me in a cell and some lackey runs in with a bowl of wiggling worms and something that looks like a knife. And they want me to eat it."  
  
Everybody began to chuckle again as they watched the first officer try to show them the stomach-wrenching dish in clumsy pantomime.  
  
Kjolgaard emptied his cup and poured himself some more. "So I sit there and the Klingon looks at me like he's really insulted and starts jabbering something about how it's an honor to be fed the worms since it's given to prisoners who are about to die honorably." He pointed to his shoulder. "That's when I got the scar. Apparently the Klingon didn't really like it when I took the bowl of worms and dumped it into his uniform." At that, the entire assembly burst into raucous laughter. Kjolgaard looked pleased with himself as he took another drag from the cup.  
  
"That's Dane for you," shouted the admiral to Captain Beddoes over the applause. "Never misses a chance to tell us about that scar of his. Last time I heard him it was with Andorians instead of Klingons, though."  
  
As the first officer embarked upon another epic, however, this time about the more traditional subject of Erik the Red and his Viking horde, the wall communicator began to howl loudly. "Damn," swore Kieran, "can't they make it sound better at least?" He pressed a button on the side of the speakers. "Kieran here."   
  
"This is Sarevok," said a clipped voice through the intercom. "I would recommend that you take a look at this."  
  
"Well..." Kieran heaved a sigh as he glanced back longingly at his half-emptied bowl. "Looks like we'll have to cut dinner short. I'll sing you the song later." Without another backwards glance, he raced towards the bridge.  
  
  
Bridge  
1805 Hours  
  
"A faint reading," said Sarevok, pointing to his science console. It was your typical mess of lines and polygons which held absolutely no meaning for the admiral. Just looking at everything move made him dizzy, which was, he reflected, probably why he wasn't wearing blue. "It is no more than a speck when compared to the emissions we're getting from the Ffestinog and the surrounding area. If you look closely, however, you'll see that there's an inordinate amount of radiation coming from it."  
  
All of that held no significance whatsoever for Admiral Forester. "So can you say what you just said in simple terms so I can understand it?"  
  
"It's a temporal anomaly." The science officer would have been tremendously excited--if he had been human. "I believe it's an occurrence of the Kabrigati phenomenon. It was first picked up by Captain James T. Kirk when he traveled back in time to find two humpback whales. Ianlus Kabrigati was head of the Science Operations department back then and he received a copy of the data taken from the captured Bird of Prey. Since then, there have been precisely two more registered occurrences on the record and this, in my opinion, would be--"  
  
Kieran held up his hand. "So it's a science thing and it's an important science thing?"  
  
"That is a correct statement."  
  
The admiral furrowed his brows thoughtfully. "It's tempting, but you know as well as I do that we can't divert the Hyperion right now."  
  
Sarevok looked as scandalized as a Vulcan possibly could. "Admiral," he finally said, "this is one of our only chances to study the phenomenon. It would be much more of a benefit to SciFleet, I can assure of that, much more so than laying to rest the soul of a half-breed--"  
  
The admiral barely restrained himself from physically assaulting his science officer. S'Tasik was right, he realized. That was why he didn't leave his katra with somebody. Vulcans still can't accept the notion that people like him exist. "Which is why I'm doing it," he said to himself.  
  
Captain Beddoes was completely oblivious to what was going on. "You know what?" he said suddenly. "This would be a great time for my rookies to learn what it takes to be in Starfleet. Maybe you could send the Ffestinog and we'll take a looksee."  
  
"The science capabilities on board your ship are barely sufficient to study the biology of amoebas," sniffed Sarevok ("Burning bridges anywhere and everywhere," muttered Kjolgaard).  
  
"Why don't we borrow you, then?" asked the captain. "I'm sure you could operate our system up to SciFleet specifications. With the admiral's permission, of course," he hastily added.   
  
Kieran admired the beauty of the solution. Beddoes knew full well that Vulcans still had emotions no matter what they wanted to say. If Sarevok refused his offer, then he'd be giving up a chance to work on what sounded like one of the greatest scientific achievements of the century. Plus there was the little matter of an ego to consider.  
  
Sarevok nodded. "In that case we must leave at once. The phenomenon lasts for six days at the most. We will need every warp factor your engines can give us."  
  
The insults to his ship were just too much for Beddoes. "Why don't you get your ass onto the ship and then we'll show you just what it can do?" he snapped back. "Sir."  
  
The Vulcan shrugged and went to get his things.  
  
"Send me a postcard," Kieran called to them as the human and the Vulcan left for the transporter room.   
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Peacekeeper-A, Patrolling Ninema Asteroid Field  
Bridge  
2000 Hours  
  
"Status report!" ordered Lieutenant S'Taelh as the unknown ship dropped out of warp a few thousand klicks away from his ship. "I want a detailed scan of everything on board. What weapons. What cargo. Everything."  
  
"Aye-aye, sir!" The ensign at the science officer's station leapt to action. "Okay, we're dealing with the True Lies, Orion registry," he reported a few seconds later. "It's a heavily modified Federation merchant ship, crew of thirty-four, officer complement of ten. Cargo...nothing illegal and nothing of interest. Weapons..." The ensign whistled. "Heavily modified. I'd say at least eight phaser arrays, Type VII probably, two proton torpedo launchers, and four disruptor cannons--stolen."  
  
"So you are telling me that whatever that ship is carrying conforms entirely to Federation regulation?" S'Taelh, who had heard quite a few tales about space pirates from Ryan Laskir (a good friend of his father and son of one of the more infamous cartel owners during the war against the ISC), knew that the only reason pirates had big ships was to get big money and the only way to get big money was to use those big ships to transport lots of cargo. Lots of illegal cargo.   
  
"Well, it's suspicious, sir, but--"  
  
"Communications, open a hailing frequency."  
  
The comm officer twiddled a few dials. "Frequencies open, Lieutenant."  
  
"This is the Federation warship USS Peacekeeper, Orion merchant vessel. You are ordered to stand down and lower your shields immediately."   
  
The man on the screen was green--very green--and fit every one of Starfleet's sneaky-trader stereotypes. "What do you want with Captain Dulk, Vulcan?" he immediately growled in heavily-accented Standard. "I'll have you know that we're entirely within Federation law--"  
  
"We shall find out the truth of that statement," said S'Taelh smoothly. "I order you to stand down, lower your shields, and prepare for a security team to beam over and inspect your cargo."  
  
"Hell no!" Dulk looked outraged. "That's a violation of standard trade procedures. I'll have you reported, Pointy, I'll have you dragged up before the Board!"  
  
"Those weapons of yours are also a violation of standard trade procedures, Orion captain. I have, to put it frankly, never seen any merchant vessel as well armed as yours."  
  
"Well, you take what you get."  
  
"In that case," S'Taelh said, "I will have to impound your ship. Preliminary scans show that you've acquired a number of Klingon disruptor cannons of military origin that could only have been stolen. Stand down and lower your shields." He let his voice take on a more menacing tone. "Now."  
  
The captain's entire appearance changed dramatically. He clearly knew that there was no way his merchant ship--modified as it was--could defeat a Starfleet cruiser. "I just forgot," he said silkily, "I have a lot of things in my hold which I think you'd all want. Trellian kvoras, you know, and a homemade stash of Orion demma--"  
  
S'Taelh gave the order for the audio portion of the communication to be cut. While the Orion gesticulated wildly on the screen, he outlined his plan.  
  
"Very good," he said at last, interrupting the pirate in the middle of giving his inventory. "Your offer has intrigued me."  
  
The Orion's yellow eyes lit up in hope.  
  
"But not enough," S'Taelh finished. "Captain to Engineering."  
  
"Madison here."  
  
"I want you to prepare the warp engines for immediate departure."  
  
"Aye-aye, sir!" said the chief engineer with a little too much enthusiasm. Clearly he thought that by overacting the part, it would be more convincing. "I shall most certainly go prepare the warp engines for immediate departure. We will be leaving this area very shortly. Yes, sir, we will be out of here at Warp 9 by the time I'm done with this baby. Preparing the warp engines for departure now."  
  
This was absolute bullshit. Starfleet regulations required all combat vessels to have their warp core online at all times in case of trouble. It took quite a bit of energy to restart a dead engine, and, because a single well-placed volley could cripple a ship, Starfleet didn't want to take the chance of not being able to run.  
  
But Captain Dulk didn't know that.  
  
"You see," he said as he turned back towards Captain Dulk, whose green face was paling, "it turns out that our crew is not interested in anything you have to offer. I would be perfectly willing to make you a deal, providing that you have something of interest. However, you do not."  
  
"Wait! Wait--" The Orion snapped his fingers and a few of his lackeys shuffled around behind him. "Would you be interested, then, in something more military in style?"  
  
S'Taelh allowed himself a small smile. "What do you have in mind?"  
  
"Because Captain Dulk likes you," said the Orion ingratiatingly, "he shall give you information. Free information. On board this ship we have the parts for a freshly--acquired--plasma torpedo tracking device. It would be highly valuable, would it not...?"  
  
"Of course." S'Taelh leaned forward in his chair. "Transmit the schematics."  
  
"You will have to pay for that information, Pointy." Captain Dulk seemed to revel in holding the stronger bargaining position.  
  
"Very well," said the Vulcan after making a show of considering the offer. "We shall close to five klicks and begin transfer of credits. When that is done you will send us the parts."  
  
"Why of course." Captain Dulk smiled. "It was a pleasure doing business with you." The image on the screen clicked off and the Orion ship began to move towards the waiting Peacekeeper.  
  
The lieutenant hit his communicator. "S'Taelh to Transporter Room."  
  
"Yes, Lieutenant?"  
  
"Prepare to transport timed smoke grenades onto the enemy bridge when I give the mark. When the Orions are paralyzed I want a security team there to capture the ship. Immediately."  
  
"Aye, sir. As you ordered." The intercom clicked twice.  
  
"We have done all you requested," Captain Dulk said again. "We are lowering shields for transport."  
  
"Mark!" shouted S'Taelh. The Peacekeeper's front screen dropped for a split second, sending the deadly grenades onto the Orion bridge. As Captain Dulk sank to the ground, unable to move, the shields dropped for a second time and a sixteen-member security team arrived.  
  
A few more phaser shots and all was over. "The ship is seized," said the commander of the security team over the intercom. "Captain Dulk and his cronies are in the brig. We're setting a course for the nearest base."  
  
"And I'm sure the Romulans would like their plasma torpedo back as well," said S'Taelh. "Well done."  
  
The science officer looked at his commander with newfound respect. "You bluff extremely well, sir, for--well, for a Vulcan."  
  
"I'm not Vulcan," said S'Taelh as he walked out of the bridge.  
  
  
Deck 5, Captain's Quarters  
2200 Hours  
  
The lieutenant sat down heavily as the doors to his quarters closed behind him. That encounter with the Orion was enough adventure for one day. Sighing to himself, he took out his log and began to compose his report.  
  
"Message for Lieutenant S'Taelh," his computer said just as he was getting to the good part.  
  
"From?"  
  
"Admiral Kieran Forester, stationed aboard the USS Hyperion-C."  
  
S'Taelh's eyes widened. Kieran Forester was one of his father's best friends. They had served together during the war against the ISC, the return of the ISC, and now against the Imperials. "I'll take it," he said immediately, putting away the log. "How are you, Admiral?"  
  
"I'm doing just fine." He took a sip out of a cup of coffee. "Just fine, thanks. Anyways, when does your tour with the Peacekeeper end?"  
  
"In two weeks, sir."  
  
"Hm. Just enough time, then."  
  
"For what, sir?"  
  
"I'm on my way to Vulcan for a...diplomatic visit...and something's come up. I sent Captain Beddoes to check it out and now I need an escort. Perhaps you would like to take up the post?"  
  
"That--that would be an honor, Admiral."   
  
"You flatter me," said Kieran, smiling. "When can I expect you?"  
  
"At maximum warp, approximately two days."  
  
" 'Approximately?' "  
  
"Two point one days, sir."   
  
S'Taelh didn't understand when the admiral started chuckling. "Never mind, it's an inside joke. On another note, I put your name up for promotion per Smithy's request and Starfleet accepted it. So it's now Lieutenant Commander."  
  
"I've been promoted--"  
  
"Don't thank me, thank Smithy. I'll see you in...two point one days. Kieran out." The admiral's face disappeared from the screen.  
  
The Vulcan stopped to consider the surprising turn of events for a moment, and then decided that he wouldn't be so lucky again. Why not use it while I have it?   
  
Changing into a fresh uniform (with the appropriate insignias), he picked up a deck of cards and went to go see if the chief engineer was free for a game of poker. 


	3. Part II

=/\= Part II =/\=  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, En Route to System Vulcan  
Deck 2, Observation Lounge  
1100 Hours   
  
"Yes?" Kieran asked distractedly as the bell chimed. "Who is it?"  
  
"It's Caitlin," came a muffled voice from the other side of the wall. "I've got a message for you." Kieran began saying the Hail Mary.  
  
Perhaps the CMO sensed his hesitation, for she moved rapidly to reassure him. "No, it's not a physical. I just have a message that I thought you might like to see."  
  
The admiral sighed. "All right, come in." The doors slid open and Caitlin Denning strolled towards him, a data PADD in hand.  
  
"Really witty," she said, trying to suppress a chuckle. "I got this from one of our orderlies today."  
  
Kieran took the disk and started reading.  
  
"A Starfleet engineer and doctor walked into a bar and started talking to each other. After getting completely drunk so that security clearances didn't really matter anymore, the conversation turned to a classified incident in which the Klingons attacked and almost destroyed a Federation cruiser. 'I was in the engine room when it got hit by sixteen consecutive disruptor blasts,' said the engineer proudly. 'It took quite a bit of medical knowledge on my part to fix up the ship and get us the hell out of there.'  
  
'Well, I operate too,' sniffed the doctor.  
  
'On what?' scoffed the engineer. 'Biological crap?'  
  
'You've never seen the inside of a council member's body, have you?'  
  
The engineer sheepishly admitted that he had never had that particular honor.  
  
'Well, it's great. Just like a machine. They've got no heart, no brain, cold blood, they're full of hot air, and to top it all off, their heads and their asses are interchangeable.'   
  
--Starfleet Datalinks: A Compendium of the Worst Jokes in History"  
  
"Unfortunately that's all too true," Kieran managed after recovering (somewhat) from a fit of laughter. "I'm glad we don't have people like that in Starfleet."  
  
"Oh yes we do," said Caitlin. "They're called 'brass.' "  
  
"Hey!"  
  
"Present company excepted, of course," she conceded graciously. "Anyways, I thought you'd like it. You look like you need a laugh. Could it be that Vulcan mind-meld?"  
  
"Maybe. But you're sure as hell not going to study it."  
  
She grinned and stood up. "Well, I'll get going now. Boris is scheduled for his monthly physical ten minutes from now, and if he doesn't show--" She made a fist and slammed it into her palm. "Have a nice day." The doors closed behind her, leaving Kieran alone with his thoughts.  
  
The admiral looked at the stars in silent contemplation for a few more moments. Then he realized that he still had to fill out Sarevok's temporary transfer request to the Ffestinog. "Too bad," he said out loud. "I could get used to this."   
  
Almost reluctantly, he turned away and went to finish his paperwork.  
  
  
Bridge  
1206 Hours  
  
"New ship coming into sensor range," said the interim science officer, a promising young ensign promoted when Sarevok left to study his beloved Kabrigati. "Scans consistent with a Sovereign-X Federation cruiser, sir."  
  
"Just on time. Hail them and ask them to form up on us."  
  
"Aye-aye, sir." Sharia Izar transmitted the message and turned back to the admiral. "They're inputting the coordinates now, sir. And the captain wishes to know if you would be free for dinner tonight."  
  
"Only if Caitlin cooks. I don't trust the young 'uns anymore." Kieran broke into a wide grin. "My treat this time. Tell him I'll meet him at 1800."  
  
The admiral was looking forward to this. Hopefully Caitlin would have figured out a way to burn the place down again--the second time in a week, too. Then he thought of the inevitable physical and cringed involuntarily.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Ffestinog, Holding Position Sector 109,164  
Bridge  
1200 Hours  
  
Sarevok stood back and admired his work. In a few hours, he had managed to get the unbelievably primitive sensor net on board the Ffestinog to work and to work properly, which was probably one of the greatest achievements in scientific history. Whoever had designed the thing had obviously had no knowledge of science or anything to do with it. Sarevok was looking forward to getting a prize once he showed the modifications to SciFleet.  
  
Captain Jason Beddoes, of course, was completely unimpressed. "So you cut a few yellow wires and stuck a blue wire where the yellow wires were? Oh, and--my god, you guys got to see this--can that really be a purple stick-thingy?"  
  
The Vulcan sighed in the quintessential Vulcan way--he didn't. "That instrument which you so disingenuously refer to as the 'purple stick-thingy' is the key to the entire operation. Doctor Kabrigati developed a prototype version years ago but it has never been truly built. Until now."  
  
"That's what they all say."  
  
"You can consult the Datalinks if you wish, but I am--"   
  
The human sighed in the quintessential human way--he let flow a tremendous volley of expletives that would have shamed an Orion pimp. "Okay, you damned leprechaun," he finally said, after his entire vocabulary of curse words had been exhausted, "you win. You take your purple stick-thingy and you go measure that radiation wave."  
  
"And you?"  
  
"I--" Beddoes drew himself up to his full height. "I will go eat dinner." He exited the bridge majestically, shoulders thrown back and captain's pips gleaming, leaving Sarevok politely confused.  
  
"Homo sapiens," said the Vulcan in barely-revealed exasperation and began to test his purple stick-thingy one more time.  
  
  
Bridge  
1336 Hours  
  
"Approaching the object now," called the helm officer. "Bearing...one-six-four. And hot damn but that's a lot of radiation."  
  
"Screens up," ordered Beddoes as the viewer was bombarded by trillions of atoms of potentially deadly radiation. "Let's stay as far away as possible."  
  
"It is not dangerous." Sarevok stood up quickly. "And besides, our instruments will only work if we close to within twenty thousand kilometers."  
  
"They're called klicks," the captain muttered under his breath. Aloud: "I'm the captain of this vessel and I have supreme command. As far as I'm concerned you're just another science officer hitching a free ride. So you get your ass back there in your seat and let me handle this." Beddoes couldn't see how Admiral Forester could stand spending almost a hundred years of his life with that overbearing Vulcan. No wonder they didn't have a very good reputation around the galaxy.  
  
Reluctantly, Sarevok took his seat.  
  
"Check your instruments." Beddoes' voice took on a softer tone. "And don't do that again."  
  
The science officer complied. "Nothing," he said. "I am telling you, we must get closer before we--"   
  
Suddenly, there was a thunderous jolt as the Ffestinog rocked upwards. The lights on the ship dimmed, only to reappear as secondary power kicked in.  
  
"Not dangerous my ass," he mumbled as the deflector shields were activated. "What happened?"  
  
"It appeared to be a sudden pulse of radiation," said Sarevok, studying his instruments. "That was recorded by Captain Kirk and his crew as well. It was...fortunate...that I had the foresight to begin the recording when we first arrived in the area."  
  
"That sudden pulse of radiation almost blew up the ship!"  
  
The Vulcan looked like he was talking to a small child. "Captain, must I quote regulations on you? Starfleet protocol clearly insists that when faced with a possible scientific breakthrough--"  
  
"And those same regulations also state that the preservation of a ship is the most important thing! And that is what I mean to do--" The Ffestinog rocked again, much harder this time. Beddoes stopped talking. The phenomenon had did his work for him.  
  
As the crew began to relax, however, it started once more. Each time harder and harder, faster and faster--the lights began to flicker with more intensity--collision alarms began to sound--  
  
"Get us the hell out of here!" shouted Beddoes, turning to his helm officer. "Ms. Fields--Shit!" A momentary flash of red light showed the helm officer sprawled across the floor, unconscious. She had apparently not held onto the railing hard enough. The captain was striding across the deck to take her place when a particularly violent tremor hit his ship. Beddoes was flung across the bridge and crashed onto the tactical officer's console.  
  
The Ffestinog shimmered and faded out of existence. She had cloaked.  
  
At that moment the tremors stopped.  
  
The bridge crew raised their heads in surprise.  
  
The alarms stopped sounding.  
  
The lights shut off.  
  
And Captain Beddoes woke up to see something which only a few humans had seen before.  
  
"What...the fuck...is that..." he said in awe.  
  
The point from which the radiation was emanating rapidly became a large blur on the Ffestinog's viewer. Then a larger blur, shifting colors from red to purple to ultraviolet and beyond, stretching across the entire screen and beyond. Bolts of pure energy crackled around it, out of it--dangerously near the ship itself.  
  
It was beautiful beyond all comprehension.  
  
Captain Beddoes hesitantly hit the cloaking button again. The Ffestinog faded back into normal space. At the same time the energy ribbon faded into nothingness. "I hope you got a record of that," he asked Sarevok quietly. Still in shock.   
  
The Vulcan simply nodded.  
  
"Okay," Beddoes said, taking a deep breath. "We've seen it. Sarevok's got a tape of it. Now it's time to send it back to Starfleet Command and see what the hell that thing is."  
  
"Unsafe." Sarevok's entire demeanor was changed. In place of Vulcan iciness there was now genuine excitement. Even the captain knew that this was the discovery of the century. "I do not wish this falling into the wrong hands. Can the Ffestinog return to base herself?"  
  
"Our tour's almost over--"  
  
"Good. Helmsman!" ordered the Vulcan. She had been revived by a few hypos from the CMO and was seated at her place, looking none the worse for wear. "Set course to the nearest SciFleet station."  
  
"Course laid in, sir. Warp speed on your command."  
  
"Engage!"  
  
This time, Captain Beddoes didn't dare contradict him.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, En Route to System Vulcan  
Officer's Mess  
1920 Hours  
  
Kieran hadn't been this nostalgic in years.  
  
It's the damned alcohol, he thought to himself in rage. Piece of shit! The bottle soared out of his hand and crashed against the walls of the room, the glass tinkling merrily as it cascaded towards the ground.  
  
"What is it, Admiral!" S'Taelh leapt up from his seat and ran towards him. "Are you all right?"  
  
"I'm--I'm--" He laughed hollowly. "I'm fine. Fine. Just the wine."  
  
"If I may say so myself, Admiral, the amount of drinks you consumed in the previous hour and the reaction you attribute to it are entirely inconsistent with studies on the subject."  
  
"Studies?" Kieran raised his eyes to meet the Vulcan's. "By all means, continue. Absolutely fascinating subject, that, what happens when a person gets himself drunk." He made a noise of disgust in his throat and looked for another bottle to throw.  
  
Fortunately, S'Taelh had quite prudently placed them out of reach.  
  
"Yes, studies. If I recall correctly, it was Professor Mickiewicz at Osborne University who studied the chemical composition of off-world reds and discovered--am I boring you, Admiral?"  
  
"No, it's just--" The admiral began to laugh again. "My God, you sound just like your father. Christ, if anybody commits an obscure civilian study about 'the chemical composition of off-world reds' it would either be him or you. But--"  
  
His laughter stopped suddenly.  
  
"But my father is dead," prompted the son.  
  
"Yes. Yes. Your father is...dead. But he's still alive." He tapped his head knowingly, as if revealing a dreadful secret. "In here."  
  
S'Taelh looked as shocked as a Vulcan could possibly have looked. "Time travel," he breathed. "You violated one of the basic tenets of Starfleet protocol in order to save my father's katra and--what?"  
  
Everything was flooding back--the helplessness as the Peacekeeper's every weld seemed to tremble milliseconds before the explosion, the fury as an empty coffin was shot into the depths of space in memory of a fallen officer, the genuine sorrow of losing a true friend (even though he would never have admitted it in public). "A decent burial," he finally said, almost too softly to hear.  
  
"That's all."  
  
The admiral nodded.  
  
"A burial."  
  
"Come," said Kieran as he shuffled to his feet. "Come on. Let me show you something."  
  
The Vulcan followed him curiously.  
  
  
Deck 2, Observation Lounge  
1931 Hours  
  
Kieran walked over to the deck and ran his hands on the weathered steering wheel, used by sailors long past. The tarred brown wood was covered by pockmarks from centuries of wear. It was a venerable monument to the age of sail, standing guard over centuries of history.  
  
"It's remarkable, isn't it?" he said to S'Taelh. "Do you think any one of those sailors would ever have imagined that I would be touching my wheel--their wheel--a few trillion light-years away from the Pacific Ocean?"  
  
"Indeed. It is amazing that this object, which I believe is dated 1765 if my knowledge of military history is worth anything, survived the ravages of three world wars, one of which was a nuclear one. The craftsmanship of the ancient mariners must have been stunning. It is remarkably well-preserved."  
  
"You're missing the point, my good Vulcan," said Kieran. "As your father would have as well. From the looks of it, it's no more than a wheel to turn around a ship. But for me, it's more than that. Can't you close your eyes for a moment--just a moment, S'Taelh--and imagine that you're at the helm of one of those ancient galleons? Feeling the wind and salt spray crashing over you as the ship dips and dives in the waves. Can't you see that in your mind?"  
  
The Vulcan raised an eyebrow. "I do not have the same powers of visualization that you do, Admiral, to put it bluntly. I am glad that you do not engage in these hallucinations while you are commanding, otherwise Starfleet would lose a great officer."  
  
Kieran laughed so hard that S'Taelh tried to perform a Heimlich maneuver on him.  
  
"You're all the same," he said, gasping for breath. "Just like your father, although I imagine he'd try to lecture me even more." Finally, the admiral sobered. "But I don't want you to analyze the damned thing. I want you to look at it. Appreciate it."  
  
S'Taelh stared at the steering wheel like it would leap on him and start assaulting him at any opportunity. "I am already 'looking' at it, Admiral. What more do you want me to do with it? Perhaps if I made it into a hologram and displayed it a museum I would appreciate it more." Kieran didn't laugh. "That was Vulcan joke, Admiral."  
  
"I know. It wasn't funny."  
  
The Vulcan tried to figure out something to say to that.  
  
"Go on," said Kieran impatiently. "Touch it. Do something with it. Don't stand there like a vegetable."  
  
Hesitantly, S'Taelh reached out and put his finger--one finger--on the wood.   
  
"That's it," Kieran said approvingly. "Now watch. Computer! Lights off. Open viewscreen."  
  
The room lights gradually dimmed and shut down, and, right in front of S'Taelh's uninterested gaze, two doors began to open.  
  
There it was. The fabric of space. Stars. Countless stars. Millions upon millions upon millions of stars. S'Taelh's jaw dropped.  
  
"Never seen it like that, hmm?" Kieran couldn't help but feel a bit self-satisfied. "And believe it or not, those stars are the very same stars that the sailors using this wheel you're holding saw almost seven hundred years ago."  
  
S'Taelh nodded slowly. "I am beginning to see where you're going with this, Admiral. A truly exquisite analogy. Surak would have been proud."  
  
"You see, S'Taelh," said Kieran as he took his place next to the Vulcan, "Humans are dreamers.  
  
"We started dreaming in the days of our ancestors' ancestors, when first our eyes looked heavenwards at the cold light of the stars, a thousand flashing suns set against the darkness that was night. We dreamed of reaching them. Of seeing what they were made up of. Of touching them, maybe, or bringing a few down to the earth.  
  
"When stone by stone the pyramids rose in the sands of the deserts even the humblest worker must have spared a glance at them, shining serenely down at them, silent witnesses to his labors and his toils. The messenger who ran the very first marathon to Athens would have spent many a night gazing at them, guardians of a mysterious past and an misty future older than Time himself. A soldier of Caesar's army, worn after a long day of battle, could have sat by a crackling fire with his fellow legionaries and stared at them, their tiniest outshining the largest blaze any had it in their power to start.  
  
"As the sun slowly retreated below the trenches they were there, bright and terrible, heralds of welcoming darkness bringing hope of a dawn free from the terrible attrition on the front. Men had long since stopped relying on them to guide their way across troubled waters but now the brave airmen shot down knew them to be beacons showing the road from occupied territory to liberty.  
  
"They're the same stars, S'Taelh, that the first humans watched with wide-eyed fascination . Years--ages--eons--we have dreamed of them. They are the only things that can withstand the ravages of Time, the only constants in that ever-flowing ever-changing continuum that is the universe.  
  
"And now we've reached them. We've done the impossible. And you're telling me that I can't dream? Of giving my friend the last honor which must be accorded to him?"  
  
S'Taelh opened his mouth and then closed it again. "You have shown a remarkable ability for memorization," he finally said. "If I recall correctly part of your previous soliloquy was taken from Zefram Cochrane's speech at the opening of the Warp Five Complex--"  
  
"Wasn't he human too?"  
  
"A very good point."  
  
"So you see, Starfleet regulations or no Starfleet regulations, it was the least I could do. For myself. And for your father."  
  
The admiral's eyes blurred. Two realities appeared in front of him, and suddenly he saw a much younger himself having this very same talk with S'Tasik on a different bridge. About the human concept of friendship, something which he really couldn't grasp. Hopefully, things would be different this time around.  
  
He smiled wistfully and turned away from the viewscreen. "Computer, lights on full." The vision ended.  
  
Kieran hadn't been this nostalgic in years. 


	4. Part III

=/\= Part III =/\=  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Ffestinog, En Route to Starbase 1039  
Deck 3, Ready Room  
2000 Hours  
  
Every time Captain Beddoes looked at it, he couldn't help the thrill of wonder that ran down his back. "Play it again," he ordered. "Maybe this time the computer will figure out what it is."  
  
"You are wasting your time, Captain," said Sarevok with just a hint of exasperation in his carefully controlled voice. "I think it is eminently obvious that this phenomenon has never before been recorded by the Federation. As far as the computer is concerned it is simply a...sensor anomaly."  
  
Beddoes refrained from asking if the entire bridge crew had been subjected to hallucinogens. Instead, he simply stared at the twisting vortex of energy, captured forever by nothing more than a shipboard camera.  
  
"So why did it appear when the captain hit the phase cloak?" the ship's science officer asked. "I didn't detect the thing when we first entered the area."  
  
Sarevok thought for a moment. "I have a hypothesis," he said slowly. "Let me remind you that this is nothing more than a conjecture of mine, based on the scant facts we do have on the Kabrigati object. With access to classified Starfleet databases, I would probably be able to confirm it, but, as of now, it is just a--"   
  
"Why don't you wake me up when you're ready to tell us?" asked the captain, putting just the right amount of sarcasm into his voice. The Vulcan glared at him but launched into his explanation.  
  
"I assume all of you are familiar with the work of Albert Einstein. If we work under the restrictions of Einsteinian physics, warp drive would be impossible. As a ship the size of the Ffestinog approaches speed c, its mass increases proportionally. It would take an infinite amount of power to accelerate the ship."  
  
"And yet we're moving at a few hundred times the speed of light."  
  
"Exactly, Captain. That is because we are not using Einsteinian physics. Instead, we're applying Zefram Cochrane's theory of transdimensional travel." Sarevok gestured to the window, where faint warp lines were visible as the Ffestinog sped through space. "Warp engines blow a hole in normal spacetime and, in that millionth of a second, this ship and everything inside it is shifted to a different dimension. Where Einstein's laws simply don't apply."  
  
"All of this is all well and good," said Beddoes, "but you still haven't explained why the phase cloak triggered the energy vortex. So far, everything you're telling us can be found in a history textbook."  
  
"It was an analogy, Captain," replied Sarevok with a pained expression on his face. "I am merely using a rather well-known example to illustrate a point. May I continue?"  
  
Beddoes tried to refrain from smacking the Vulcan in the face. "Go on, go on," he said impatiently.  
  
"This ship's phase cloak operates under different conditions, of course, but the principle is the same. When we operate the cloak, we shift in and out of normal space or warp space, rendering us effectively invisible to sensors and the capabilities of the eye. The cloaking field is a miniature transdimensional device of sorts. And every time we use it, we disrupt the space-time continuum."  
  
The concept was beginning to sink in now. "So when Captain Beddoes hit the phase cloak button--"  
  
"--he triggered a rip in the cosmos--"  
  
"--that created the energy vortex--"  
  
"--because Nature abhors a vacuum--"  
  
"Exactly," said Sarevok, looking as pleased as a Vulcan could be at the logical reasoning of his protégés.  
  
Captain Beddoes didn't fail to see the implications of the "hypothesis." "That thing could have killed us, and if a careless captain engages his cloak, he'll get his ship ripped to pieces. Which could lead to serious consequences for Starfleet."  
  
A glance at Sarevok served to confirm his worst expectations.  
  
"Oh shit," he said to nobody in particular.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, En Route to System Vulcan  
Holodeck  
2022 Hours  
  
In Kieran's opinion, the holodeck was one of the most degenerate pieces of equipment ever installed on board a starship precisely because the possibilities it offered were limitless. Aided by the wonders of modern holographic technology, any person with a simple knowledge of how the machine worked could program it do amazing things. They could go back in time and play poker with Franklin Delano Roosevelt; transport themselves to the bridge of the Enterprise and test their wits with an angry Klingon commander; even visit the interior of Zefram Cochrane's revolutionary Phoenix, the first warp-capable vessel built by humans. For the lonely man or woman, it also provided other--services--which weren't as pure in nature.  
  
Even a person with remarkable self-control could only resist the temptation so long, which was why the admiral felt just a little twinge of guilt as he slid a data disk into the computer terminal at the far end of the holodeck.  
  
"Initiate program Forester-One," he said and watched in fascination as the drab gray walls shimmered and disappeared entirely.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Iron Throne  
Ship's Library  
Ninety-One Years Ago  
  
  
In the age of faster-than-light travel, books had increasingly been relegated to a minor role in a person's normal life. This was quite understandable, actually. With the development of the warp engine can the development of advanced computer systems to control it, and those advanced computer systems could also be used to store, file, and display all of the famous works of literature written by all of the famous authors hailing from all of the planets from all of the galaxy. Books were now anachronisms, symbols of a civilization generations past which had not even had the intelligence to recognize its own self-destructiveness.  
  
Kieran had been in a real, honest-to-god bookstore only once. He was a promising candidate for Command at the Academy back then, and was strolling along the streets of San Francisco thinking what it would be like to have an entire starship at his beck and call. The cadet was so engrossed in his dreams that he didn't notice where he was going until he tripped over a discarded pail of fish and landed right in front of an old wooden door.  
  
Back then he had treated the proprietor's desperate attempt to interest him in a classic Hemingway or Steinbeck as the dying gasp of a dying age. "They're outdated," he had said as he stepped out of the door looking extremely chagrined. "Why buy them when you can find them on the LCARS?" And with that, he had stormed outside, leaving behind that doddering old fool still holding a copy of "The Grapes of Wrath" in his outstretched hand.  
  
It was only until after he graduated that he realized how foolish he had been. There was more to a book than the clean, computerized versions available for sale. Each one had a vivid history to its credit, something which simply couldn't be captured by the most powerful LCARS database. Immediately after the ceremony he ran to that very same sidewalk only to see the tiny shop shuttered up with a "For Sale" sign on the door.  
  
That was why Kieran made it a point to keep his collection on board the Iron Throne, ranging from "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" to "Meet Mr. Pointy: A Guide to Vulcans." It wasn't as large as he would have liked--he hadn't managed to get any Hemingways or Steinbecks yet--but it was still respectable.  
  
My God, Kieran thought to himself in awe as the holodeck transformed into an exact duplicate of his old library. Hesitantly, he reached for a book and opened it. "It was the best of times..." he read slowly, his eyes stinging. "It was the worst of times..."  
  
"If I am not overstepping my bounds, sir, may I point out that that is an illogical statement?" came a voice from behind him.  
  
The book clattered to the floor. "S'Tasik," Kieran breathed.  
  
"That would be my name," the Vulcan said, puzzled. "I had no idea you committed it to memory. Was it something in my personnel file, perhaps, or--"  
  
"No--no, that's not it." Kieran stared at him for a moment and had to remind himself that this thing in front of him was actually a clever computer-generated hologram. But everything about it was perfect. Even the characteristic upswept eyebrow. Everything! "Why don't we--why don't we sit down and talk for a moment?" He gestured to a chair and dashed a tear from his eyes angrily when he thought the cadet wasn't looking.  
  
"Talk, Commodore?"  
  
Commodore? Of course--this was 2290, after all, and he still hadn't received his promotion yet. That would come later. "Yes. Talk. Tell me about yourself."  
  
"I am approximately twenty years old in your years, Commodore, although that date cannot be ascertained. I was born somewhere unknown and my mother and father died in my infancy. I was adopted by Captain Jones and taken back to Earth for education and upbringing. I began my studies at the Vulcan Scientific Institute in 228--"  
  
"I know all that," Kieran said impatiently. "It's in your personnel file."  
  
"But sir," S'Tasik protested, "what do you want me to talk about?"  
  
"Yourself." Kieran stared earnestly into his eyes. "What you like. What you don't like. Favorite foods, what you do in your spare time. Do you have a pet? Dog? Cat? Goldfish? Anything."  
  
"I am afraid, Commodore, that I do not have any of those. I have no likes or dislikes, no spare time, and no elegant food. I think keeping animals under lock and key is simply barbaric."  
  
Kieran chuckled, all his inhibitions forgotten. He shifted in his comfortable armchair and put "A Tale of Two Cities" on a coffee table next to it, and for the next few hours, planned to stay right where he was.  
  
To talk with his long-lost friend.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
Starbase 1039 Alliance  
Administration Deck  
2030 Hours  
  
While Admiral Kieran Forester slipped away into the past, Captain Jason Beddoes was jolted back to reality as a loud expletive came from within the admiral's office. Damn, the captain thought to himself again as he cringed inwardly. Bad idea putting the Vulcan in there. He clung to the admittedly futile hope that Sarevok would learn the language of diplomacy before he got the whole ship thrown out of the base.  
  
Another loud expletive came from within the admiral's office, followed by the sound of a cup shattering on the floor. After a second fragile item crashed against something not so fragile, yet another loud expletive came from within the admiral's office and less than a millisecond later the doors slammed behind a startled Sarevok, who had been shoved and locked outside with a final parting "Fuck off, you son of a bitch-bastard!"  
  
Jason Beddoes stared first at the Vulcan and then at the door and then back at the Vulcan. "Successful mission, hmm?" he asked sarcastically as the science officer examined the coffee stains on his uniform.  
  
"I must admit," said Sarevok, trying to groom himself and retain his dignity at the same time, "that the good admiral is much more volatile than I expected. All I asked was for specialized access to classified informational files."  
  
"Was that all?"  
  
"Well, there was the relatively minor matter of him threatening to kill me if I 'insulted' a picture on his desk one more time. I was simply pointing out that the manner with which it was framed was completely antithetical to the principles of Vulcan architecture--"  
  
Captain Beddoes coughed loudly. He was friendly acquaintances with Admiral Sanzei and happened to know that the "picture" was in fact the last remaining portrait of Sanzei's mother, who had been killed in a pirate raid in his infancy. Damn, he thought again, Bad idea putting the Vulcan in there. "So what happened?"  
  
"Admiral Sanzei impounded the tape and has ordered a team of technicians to erase the files from our computer banks. What we have stumbled upon seems to be something of importance to Starfleet, otherwise none of this would have occurred."  
  
"Well, phase cloak is an important strategic advantage--it's the one of the only reasons we're winning our war against the Imps. If they can't detect us, they can't shoot at us."  
  
"Precisely. Thus I cannot understand the actions of Admiral Sanzei, an otherwise quite rational person. If phase cloak really does interfere with the iota waves emitted by the Kabrigati phenomena, then it would be more logical to inform all TacFleet captains of the dangers of using it indiscriminately."  
  
"Maybe there's more to it than we thought, then," mused Beddoes. "Do you still have that tape?"  
  
"I told you, it was impounded by Admiral Sanzei--"  
  
"And they're going to erase the files--" Captain Beddoes stopped in his tracks. "Back to the ship! Hurry!"  
  
  
USS Ffestinog, Docking Bay  
2035 Hours  
  
They were just in time. While Beddoes stalled for time, even going as far as to buy the two techs a few rounds at the ship's bar, Sarevok hurried to copy the recording from the ship's computer onto a microdisk. Finally, the Vulcan stepped away from the console, the disk secreted in his ranking pips, and walked into the ship's bar to give the "all clear."  
  
"Good day, Captain," he said stiffly. "I trust that you are doing well?" Beddoes noticed that the Vulcan's hands were twitching at his sides. Obviously he wasn't at all used to lying.  
  
"Of course, of course." He gestured to a can of beer. "Want some?"  
  
"I do not partake in fermented beverages, Captain." Sarevok's hands were now scratching uncomfortably at his neck, as the Vulcan tried (and failed) to stop himself from fingering the golden button where the microdisk was hidden. "Mineral water will be fine."  
  
As Beddoes moved to pour him a cup of water, the curious eyes of the two technicians proved too much for him. With one last spasmodic jerk, the pips flew off of Sarevok's uniform and clattered to the floor.  
  
"Groovy," one of the techs said. "Check it out, Ted, it's like there's a hidden chip inside one of those, dude!"  
  
"Really, Bill?" The other tech glanced at them appraisingly. "You're right, bro! Isn't that just radical? Check it out--"  
  
As it became clear that Sarevok was too stunned by the use of old twentieth-century vocabulary to do anything, Beddoes had to take action. Quickly he snatched up all three of the pips and stuffed them into his pocket.  
  
Bill and Ted had suddenly become all business. "We, like, need to see that, sir," one of them said, his long black hair drooping over his eyes. "It's like, you know, our job, if you know what I mean."  
  
Shit, Beddoes thought. "Sorry, boys, but I can't let you have them," he said hurriedly.  
  
"And, like, why not?"  
  
Time to think fast, hot stuff--and suddenly, an idea struck him. "It's a private tape," said the captain. "It's a very private tape."  
  
Bill and Ted looked utterly unimpressed. "So what? What's it got, then?"  
  
"It's got holograms," said the captain conspiratorially. "You know--of things."  
  
"Things? Like, what things?"  
  
"Like things Orion slave girls do, you know? Those kind of things. And you'll understand why I don't want it exposed to the admiral that our good science officer here watches those kinds of--tapes. Don't you, boys?" Beddoes was warming to his subject.  
  
Realization dawned in the eyes of the two techs. "Ah!" said one of them, winking. "Like, we understand totally," said the other.  
  
"So if you don't mind, why don't you go do what you have to do with our computer system now? I'll buy you another round afterwards...?"  
  
Bill and Ted grinned foolishly as they left the room. "Peace love dope, man," said one of them, waving two fingers at Sarevok.  
  
As the doors shut behind them, Captain Beddoes collapsed against the wall. "Don't do that again, you stupid-ass piece of--"   
  
For a moment, Sarevok looked like he would have gladly punched the captain in the stomach. Just for a moment.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, En Route to System Vulcan  
Sickbay  
0300 Hours  
  
Every so often the notoriously temperamental equipment in Sickbay would go offline and Caitlin Denning would go crazy trying to fix it. How come every piece of shit in here has to die in the morning? Saboteurs, I tell you, saboteurs-- "You! What the fuck are you doing with those tricorders! Put those right where I left them!"  
  
A terrified orderly looked at her, dropped the tricorder, and scurried off as far away as he could get from the CMO. He'd heard tell that she shouldn't be crossed in the morning, and, providing he got out of here alive, this would be something that would only substantiate that claim. "Damn young 'uns," Caitlin muttered. "Kick them off of the ship and let them freeze their asses off in vacuum."  
  
This time it was one of the neural stimulators that was on the fritz. Somehow its memory had been wiped clean and now the computer knew just as much about stimulating nerves as Franz Kafka knew about sex. Which was something that wouldn't be beneficial to her patients (or victims, depending on perspective).  
  
She pulled out a healthy stim and tried to see if she could transfer the memory cartridges to the dead one without damaging both. That was too much to ask at three in the morning, and after slamming both of the now broken ones down on her desk, she buried her head in her arms to see if she could catch some sleep. The stims would have to wait until morning.  
  
Just as she dozed off, however, she was woken up by the loud ringing of her bell. If there was anything worse than catching the CMO while she was tired, it was being the person to wake her up. She grabbed a hypospray loaded with a paralytic enzyme and went for the door.  
  
She dropped her hypospray when she saw who it was.  
  
Boris Kurchatov was standing in front of her, his already thin frame weak and emaciated. His striking blue eyes were bloodshot and had lost their usual sparkle, and he had to lean on the doorframe just to stand up.  
  
"Christ," she whispered. "What happened to you?"  
  
"Rad leak...in the engine room..." He coughed and spittle flecked with blood flew out of his mouth. "Minor...I thought...minor...apparently not--" Kurchatov tipped over and fell.  
  
"Dammit, you should have come to me sooner--" She gently lifted him up and helped him over to an empty cot. "Stay there and let's see what's happening."  
  
What she saw on her tricorder screen made her want to scream.  
  
All the chief engineer heard was a sharp intake of breath. "What...ees...et?" he asked weakly, lapsing into Russian.  
  
"You'll be fine," she said back. "You'll be fine. You'll be fine..." She closed his eyes soothingly and injected 5ccs of a powerful tranquilizer into his arm. Kurchatov stiffened and then relaxed.  
  
"Fuck," Caitlin muttered. "Major cell damage, loss of bone mass, organs losing structural integrity--orderly!"  
  
The terrified orderly ran up to her and saluted smartly.  
  
"Get the admiral. NOW."  
  
"Ma'am, I don't know where the admiral is right now--"   
  
"Well, I really don't care, now, do I? Find Kieran. And tell him to get down here if he has any shred of humanity left in him."  
  
"But--"   
  
"Listen," she said dangerously, and the orderly trembled in his shoes. "If you don't find Kieran in the next--" She glanced at her watch. "--five minutes, I'll cut out your entrails and shove them up your ass. And I'm serious, too."  
  
I don't doubt it, thought the orderly. He saluted smartly again and dashed out of Sickbay.  
  
  
Holodeck  
0304 Hours  
  
Kieran had never moved from that spot and in fact was so engrossed in his conversation with a hologram that he almost didn't hear the voice screaming at him from outside the door. "Computer, end program," he said reluctantly and watched as S'Tasik dissolved into nothingness. With one last look back at the empty gray room, he stepped outside and confronted the orderly.  
  
"What do you want?" he said coldly.  
  
"CMO--Sickbay--wants you--"  
  
Dammit, I told her not to interrupt me unless it was an emergency-- "I'll be there immediately."  
  
  
Sickbay  
0310 Hours  
  
"What is it?" Kieran asked without preamble as he ran to Caitlin Denning, who was sitting in a chair, her head buried in her arms. "What's happening?"  
  
The CMO raised her eyes to meet the admiral. "He's dying," she said shortly, her voice choked with tears. "There's nothing I can do about it."  
  
Kieran was stricken speechless. "Why?" he asked at last.  
  
"Radiation leak." Caitlin's small frame was heaving as she tried to stay calm. "Apparently he went in there to patch it up and--and--" That was as far as she could get.  
  
The admiral sank heavily into his seat. All of his years had now hit him with full force. He had been granted a reprieve at the planet of the Ba'ku, but that was only a reprieve. He should have known that he couldn't avoid death. He should have known that it had the power to hurt him, even if he lived for a hundred more years. Finally: "So now what?"  
  
"Life has to go on, doesn't it?" Caitlin whispered hoarsely. "We bury him and then get back to living our normal lives."  
  
Silence descended oppressively over the two of them as they stared at Boris' life signs on the computer terminal. His heartbeat slowly slowed its beating and then...  
  
Stopped.  
  
Caitlin collapsed onto the floor, sobbing. "Why?" she screamed, her face streaked with tears that she could not go on hiding. "Why can't we have stayed just the way we were? Why did this have to happen to us? What did we ever do--"  
  
Admiral Kieran Forester had stopped listening long before that. He was sitting hunched over in the chair, a splash of red against the clean white walls of Sickbay, with his eyes closed and his head bowed.  
  
And in a corner of his mind, a little voice began to speak.   
  
"To mourn is illogical, Commodore..." 


	5. Part IV

=/\= Part IV =/\=  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Ffestinog, Docking Bay  
Deck 3, Ready Room  
0630 Hours  
  
Captain Beddoes cleared his throat as his officers filed into the room, most of them disheveled and bleary-eyed after a rowdy night on the town. He was sympathetic to their plight--many a morning had he been dragged away from his comfortable bed--but there were always sacrifices in the line of duty. Finally, as Sarevok took his place near the front of the table, Beddoes closed and locked the doors and flicked a tiny switch on his chair.  
  
The switch was of the many "improvements" secretly added during the Ffestinog's refit after the war against the Interstellar Concordium and was linked to a electromagnetic pulse emitter tuned to render any recording devices useless. A useful precaution, if nothing else.  
  
"As most of you know, I usually don't do these things bright and early," he began, "but there are some things that just can't wait. What we're going to tell you right is top secret, you hear. And I want all of you to forget it the moment you leave this room. You good with me?"  
  
His experienced officers merely nodded--they had gone through this routine many times already--but his cadets were breathless with excitement even in their sleep-deprived state. "See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing," said his helm officer laconically.  
  
"Okay. Sarevok, hit it."  
  
The lights in the room darkened and the holoprojector in the middle of the table leapt to life.  
  
"This is a rough rendering of the area where we conducted our sweep of the Kabrigati object," the Vulcan said. "If you recall, there was an asteroid field bearing zero-two-nine--" The computer formed a group of spinning rocks where he pointed. "--and one bearing two-zero-zero. There might be slight variations in position, but you will all agree that these are the respective positions of the fields, correct?"  
  
Nods.  
  
"Good. Now I want you to keep this projection in mind while I display the next set of points." The computer's carefully plotted asteroids dematerialized, replaced with analogous green lines. Meanwhile, another group of asteroids appeared, exactly where the original ones had been. "This is taken from an Intel report filed by Admiral Kieran Forester and myself not long after the incident at Vulcan. Declassified documents suggest that we were patrolling this sector. Those reports are correct--up to a point. In reality, we had been authorized to conduct a mission back to the past in order to retrieve...crucial files...from the log of the Peacekeeper, destroyed in action against the Imperials."  
  
The officers began to whisper excitedly until Captain Beddoes slammed a very heavy book on the table.  
  
"Thank you, Captain," the Vulcan said serenely. "Now, judging from the similarities between the first sector displayed and this one, I believe it is not unreasonable to say that the place where we found the Kabrigati object and the place where we went back in time are one and the same. During that operation, I recommended the use of phase cloak so that the standard timeline would not be as disturbed."  
  
"So why wasn't the Hyperion destroyed?" All of this was news to the captain. "You saw what that energy vortex did to our ship."  
  
"That was the reason I said that it was not as destructive as it might have seemed. I could not reveal details of the operation at the time."  
  
"You couldn't reveal anything at the time," muttered Beddoes. As much as he appreciated the Vulcan overlooking his confidentiality agreements, he wasn't at all used to not being in the know. Fortunately, Sarevok either didn't hear him or chose to ignore him. After the incident in the admiral's quarters, he had realized that there was more to diplomacy than blunt statements of fact..  
  
"Now as you all know, the Hyperion and all of the other ships in TacFleet were given countless improvements after a comprehensive evaluation of their performance during the war against the ISC. One of these was improved hull plating, developed to counteract the plasmatic pulsar device used by enemy commanders. Experience has shown that this new type of plating can withstand the impact of a fully charged plasma torpedo without breaking. It is not impenetrable, but it would be tremendously difficult to break into it. As expected, after the operation the Hyperion's hull was completely unscathed--with the exception of a small breach in Engineering close to the cloakfield generator. This was marked off as an unintended side effect of the phase cloak. However, now that I have experienced much the same phenomenon aboard the Ffestinog, I have a suspicion that this breach was much more than it seemed to me at the time. Somehow, radiation from the energy field managed to leak through the Hyperion's force fields and contaminate our bridge."  
  
The captain was pleasantly surprised. Sarevok had just admitted that he had made a mistake, albeit in more than a hundred and fifty words. "So what do we do now?"  
  
"What we are doing now is a direct violation of Starfleet protocol, Captain, and I hope you realize that." Beddoes groaned, waiting for the inevitable lecture. "However, considering the circumstances, I think that we ought to do everything in our power to discover what lies at the root of this, since we are, as you humans would put it, 'already in some deep shit.' "  
  
"Even if that means hacking into Starfleet computer databases?"  
  
"When shall we start?"   
  
Captain Beddoes felt a small smile tug at his face. By God, the Vulcan was finally learning.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, En Route to System Vulcan  
Holodeck  
0630 Hours  
  
Immediately after the death of Boris Kurchatov, Engineering had been cleared of nonessential personnel. Only people that were directly involved in the running of the warp core were to be allowed inside, and only if they were wearing anti-radiation bodysuits. All of the idle engineers found themselves inexorably drawn to Sickbay, where Caitlin Denning, unusually drained, stood in reverent silence in front of Kurchatov's corpse. They were followed by the rest of the crew, who, even though they had never known the chief engineer, felt it their duty to pay their respects to the fallen.  
  
Which was why there was nobody to see Kieran crying silently in the library of the Iron Throne.  
  
The admiral had seen death before. When he was young he had watched countless crewmembers killed countless ways, their faces frozen in a rictus of pain, images burning themselves into his mind and never letting him forget that their deaths had been partly due to his stupidity, his foolishness, his absofuckinglutely stubbornness in refusing to acknowledge the terrible responsibilities that had been accorded him when he accepted command of his ship. When he was young he didn't care as much. He hadn't been best friends with any of those crewmembers: He hadn't taken them out to dinner, he hadn't hosted them in his home on Dantar, he hadn't really had the chance to form a bond with them before they were cut down in wartime. It was wartime. People died in wartime. The only thing he could do was get over it.  
  
Then some of his closest friends started dying in wartime and everything changed.  
  
Kieran didn't feel young anymore. He had already seen more years than most humans had ever seen, and he had borne witness to an entire range of history, from the General War to the war against the Imperials. But before, there was always something in his spirit which had still tried to look for the good things in life. Now even that small consolation had been crushed by Fate. When it came down to it, Kieran realized, humanity at his best simply couldn't even compare to the overwhelming power of Time. Humanity could do everything in his power to reverse it, to slow it, or to ignore it, but Time still would tick onward no matter what had been invented. For Kieran, that was an amazingly depressing thought.  
  
He didn't turn around when he felt a strong hand on his shoulder. "Dane," the admiral said hollowly, aimlessly flipping through a copy of "A Tale of Two Cities." "What are you doing here?"  
  
"To see how you were, first of all. And to ask for permission to scan the engine room personally."  
  
"Permission denied." Kieran half-heartedly hoped that the order would work, but knowing Dane Kjolgaard, it probably wouldn't. And it didn't.  
  
"As first officer of this ship, I have an obligation to safeguard it from any hazards--"   
  
"And I have an obligation to safeguard the lives of my crewmembers. The radiation leak could be dangerous. Until our engineers detect it and patch it up, nobody can go in there. Is that clear?"  
  
"Kieran, I know that--"   
  
"Is that clear?"  
  
Kjolgaard shook his head. "I can't have those inexperienced fools scanning for rad leaks in the warp core--they've never done anything of the sort since Starfleet decided to cut funding to the training program."  
  
"You could die, you know that?"  
  
"I know that."  
  
"And you still want to do it? Even though you'll end up with all of your body melted into an unrecognizable pulp?"  
  
"I will wear a radiation suit--"  
  
"No!" "A Tale of Two Cities" fell to the floor with a dull thump. "You can't do that! You're one of the only people I have left, Dane. I can't let you die, Dane, I can't let you die--"  
  
"You mean you won't let me die. You mean that because of your own selfish interests you want to sacrifice two bastards who aren't even married yet just to keep me alive. Isn't that right, Kieran? Isn't that what you want?"  
  
The admiral didn't answer.  
  
"We used to be like them," Kjolgaard said quietly, his hand never leaving his captain's shoulder. "Remember the time we snuck into Professor Fischer's lab and replaced the stuff in his test tubes with sugar water?" He chuckled. "Almost got us kicked out of the place, but we weren't. We were too good. But now, now, now...it's all different. Look at this around you." The first officer picked up the book and brushed some dust off of the cover. "If you had told Admiral Moore that a hundred years later people would be able to recreate the past he would have sent you to the funny bin."  
  
Kjolgaard sighed. "It's past our time, Kieran. We can put on new uniforms and command new ships but you know as well as I do that they're just idle pretensions. Let the new generation take over now. Let them replace the stuff in your test tubes with sugar water. It'll almost get them kicked out of the place but they won't be. Since they're too good. We're just old graying relics of antiquity, my friend. Just let go."  
  
"I can't! I've lost too much, I've given up too much--"   
  
"Fuck you!" Anger exploded within the first officer like a volcano. "When will you stop being so goddamn selfish? You're supposed to be thinking about your crew, not about yourself! But that's all right. That's all right." Dane stepped away from his captain. "You do what you think is best and I'll do what I think is best. I'm going to go to the warp core. And there's nothing you can do to stop me."   
  
"Commodore Kjolgaard! I order you to come back! That's a direct--"  
  
Dane Kjolgaard turned back towards his friend, his steely blue eyes glinting in the pale light of the library. "Go to hell," he said simply and walked out the door.  
  
  
Holodeck  
0758 Hours  
  
Kieran tapped his communicator again. "Kieran to Caitlin. Are you there?"  
  
And this time, she finally responded. "You can stop that now." The CMO sounded weak and drained. "He's dead."  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Ffestinog, Docking Bay  
Deck 3, Ready Room  
0800 Hours  
  
An hour and a half later, Sarevok hadn't even managed to crack the first passcode guarding entrance to Starfleet's classified files and Captain Beddoes was beginning to doubt those who said that being a slicer was a glamorous job. Definitely not James Bond, he thought wryly as the Vulcan punched in another command that was (like the previous six thousand four hundred and fifty) rejected. As usual.  
  
"Perhaps we must try another permutation," Sarevok muttered to himself. "If the alpha-delta sequence can be considered to be analogous to..." His voice trailed away as he punched his complex calculations into the computer. "That should do it."  
  
"Pardon me for asking but..." Beddoes tapped the Vulcan on the shoulder hesitantly. "If this one doesn't work how many more permutations are there?"  
  
The Vulcan stared at him levelly. "I do not have a precise figure, but a reasonable approximation would be somewhere in the hundred thousands. If I had to give you a 'ballpark,' however, I would say that we could be finished in the next four days."  
  
"Four days. You told me four minutes, you lying bastard!"  
  
"The system is considerably more complicated than I expected, Captain. I hope you do not expect Starfleet to guard its secrets with passwords Ittulian hackers eat for breakfast."  
  
"Well, I'm not going to wait four days. If this one doesn't work, then we do things my way."  
  
"This one will work."  
  
"If it doesn't."  
  
"It will."  
  
"It won't."  
  
"It will."  
  
"It won't."  
  
"It will."  
  
The computer beeped and two words appeared on the screen, written in boldface script: "Access Denied." It didn't.  
  
Beddoes grinned. "My way."  
  
  
Administration Deck  
0810 Hours  
  
"You see," said Beddoes as they walked side by side in the busy corridors, "almost every human female I've known has an affinity for exotic things, if you know what I mean, and from my experience that means Vulcans. So this is what we're going to do. We can't access the databases from our ship's computer since we don't have the access codes. And although it's normal Starfleet procedure to make sure that this information is available only to people who rank high enough, I'm pretty sure that Admiral Sanzei--like most admirals--will be too impatient to stick all the codes into the computer himself. If my guess is right, he's got a few lackeys to do it for him. All we need to do is to convince one of them to get our file."  
  
The Vulcan nodded. "I see. So while you distract his 'lackeys' I go into his office and recover the information we need. A very elegant plan, Captain. Very impressive."  
  
"That's not the plan. I know Admiral Sanzei--he presided at the christening of the Ffestinog, after all--and I think we both know what will happen if he catches you anywhere near his office again."  
  
"I must say that I am confused. If I am not going to access the file, then what is the point of my being here?"  
  
"I checked the duty roster today and the same yeoman who let you two days ago is there. A female yeoman." Beddoes whistled suggestively. "Nice stuff, if you ask me."  
  
"And are you implying, Captain, that I make an attempt to retrieve this information by telling this yeoman that I would be willing to engage in various physical activities with her?"  
  
"That's the gist of it, yeah."  
  
The Vulcan looked absolutely horrified. "Might I suggest that we return to our quarters to test the other permutations before we resort to such desperate forms of persuasion?"  
  
"A deal's a deal, right?" He winked. "Good luck, Pointy. I'll see you back at the ship." The captain walked away into the crowd and soon disappeared in the crush of bodies.  
  
Sarevok began regretting that he hadn't punched Jason Beddoes when he had the chance.  
  
  
Administration Deck  
0815 Hours   
  
If the Vulcan had bothered to look, he might have realized that the yeoman on duty really was quite attractive. In fact, in other circumstances, his mind would have registered the fact long ago even though he probably wouldn't have admitted it. However, Sarevok was so nervous that he didn't even notice that she was talking to him.  
  
"I said, what do you want?" she asked again. Her voice had a charming Irish lilt, and it was currently tinged with obvious impatience.  
  
"Oh." Sarevok mentally chastised himself at his lack of attention. "My captain has asked me to ask you for a favor."  
  
"And that would be what?"  
  
"He has need of access to classified data regarding the Kabrigati phenomenon--Every instance it was observed and recorded. And he also informed me that human females were extremely susceptible to a sort of 'Vulcan charm.' As such, I was instructed to ask if you wish to partake in an intimate exchange of bodily fluids if you happen to be unwilling to divulge this information."  
  
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa...slow down, slow down. What did you say you need?"  
  
"It is not I who has need of the information, it is my captain. He has need of access to classified data--"  
  
"Got it. I meant the next half."  
  
"If you were unwilling to divulge the information I was to ask you whether you wanted to partake in an intimate exchange of bodily fluids."  
  
The yeoman looked at him for a second and then burst into laughter. "You mean--that?"   
  
"I do not know of the 'that' which you're referring to."  
  
She shook her head as if to some secret joke. "Never mind. So I've heard that Vulcans are incapable of lying. Is that true?"   
  
"That is a correct statement."  
  
"Okay." She took a deep breath. "It's a risk, but you look pretty harmless. Listen, I'll see what I can do. Wait here for a second--I'll be right back." The yeoman put her notepad down on a desk and went into the office. If Sarevok hadn't been so relieved, he would have noticed that her face was tinged a bright pink.  
  
A few minutes later, the yeoman emerged from the admiral's office holding a PADD in her hand. "That's all I could dig up," she said. "Not much, but it's the only stuff in the database I have access to."  
  
Sarevok glanced at the information. "That will be quite sufficient," he finally said. "I take it, then, that you do not wish to partake in an intimate exchange of bodily fluids at this time?"  
  
"Maybe I'll call you up on that offer later." The yeoman grinned and gave the embarrassed Vulcan a light peck on the cheek. "Talk to you soon." Still looking rather red, she disappeared into the admiral's office.  
  
As Sarevok stood there stupefied, a gaggle of young engineers walked past him murmuring enviously. "Damn, that's one lucky bastard," one of them said. "Why do all the pretty girls have to go for the pointy ears? It's enough to make me want to get plastic surgery."  
  
When the Vulcan arrived back on board the Ffestinog it was with just the faintest hint of a smile on his face. 


	6. Part V

Acknowledgements: Picard's statement is remarkably similar to the battle report on http://www.startrek.com.  
  
  
=/\= Part V =/\=  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Ffestinog, En Route to System Vulcan  
Deck 3, Ready Room  
1000 Hours  
  
It all was rather anticlimactic, thought Captain Beddoes idly. He had half expected to have his ship stopped and searched by some MPs after Sarevok had waltzed off with classified information, especially after the Vulcan informed him that, in all likeliness, the yeoman would forget to erase the system access files. Sanzei had a volcanic temper and Beddoes definitely didn't want to be on the receiving end of it. And, after some quick talking to get him out of the station, he was happy that he wasn't.  
  
Sarevok hadn't taken much time to figure out the encoding on the information he had obtained from the yeoman, proving that even the most expensive systems could be circumvented with a little ingenuity. If the Klingons discovered that seducing minor officers in the Starfleet bureaucratic system could provide them with valuable classified information, wondered Beddoes, the integrity of the fleet might be compromised. Then he realized that girls didn't like bumps on guys.  
  
The computer chimed three times, signaling that the file had been debugged of all known "tracers," as they were called, programs that would send notice to Starfleet Command that somebody was opening a file without authorization. This was Beddoes' first time doing anything of the sort, and he was still nervous despite being light-years away from Alliance. He felt like getting outside the ship and kissing the engines.  
  
"Well," said the captain, taking a deep breath, "let's see what we've got here. Computer, open it." There was an acknowledging beep as the Federation insignia materialized on the screen, and for a moment he was afraid that Sarevok had pissed off the gods of hacking and there were still tracers on the file. Those fears were rapidly put to rest, however, as the familiar visage of one of the most famous commanders in Starfleet appeared before him. "Now we're talking!" he exclaimed. "I'm going to have to buy that girl a drink." Then he settled down to listen.  
  
"My name is Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Federation starship Enterprise. This tape is a report on the events leading up to the Veridian III mission, made as dictated by Starfleet operational protocols immediately after the destruction of my vessel in 2371. Full details of the incident have not been cleared for declassification as of this date, but as far as you are concerned, this is all that is relevant to your situation."  
  
Typical Starfleet, groaned Beddoes inwardly. Just when I thought we'd won.  
  
"The USS Enterprise was ordered to investigate a distress call coming from the Amargosa Laboratory, and an away team beamed to the laboratory discovered two dead Romulans and five humans left alive after a mysterious attack. One of these survivors was a Dr. Tolian Soran, a 300-year-old survivor of the El-Aurian incident that killed Captain Kirk. The energy ribbon which damaged the Enterprise-B and killed the captain is called the Nexus, a temporal anomaly moving through space. To anyone or anything inside the Nexus, linear time has no meaning and a person can experience anything that he or she desires; in fact, there is such an overpowering feeling of joy so addictive that once there it is almost impossible to leave. Soran was desperate to return to the Nexus and recreate that joy with the family he lost when his world was assimilated by the Borg.  
  
"After Lt. Commander Data plotted the course of this Nexus in Stellar Cartography it was discovered that Soran planned to do this by destroying an entire sun when the Nexus passed close to the System Veridian. Destroying the system would alter spatial forces, thereby changing the path of the Nexus and allowing Soran to re-enter the phenomenon.   
  
"I took it upon myself to dissuade him, but the joys of the Nexus were apparently too great for Soran to see reason. Meanwhile, Soran's cloaked Klingon allies managed to severely damage the Enterprise-D. The ship suffered a warp-core breach and Commander Riker ordered the saucer section separated. Fortunately, most of the crew were uninjured after an...hairy...landing on the planet of Veridian III. As the Nexus rapidly approached, Soran fired a trilithium torpedo into the sun, destroying it and sending us both into the temporal anomaly. The survivors of the Klingon attack, as well as the two hundred and thirty million inhabitants of the system, were killed."  
  
Captain Picard's face was a mask of neutrality, but even Beddoes could see the effect that must have had on him. The man had a lot of guts despite his unfortunate tendency to call a meeting whenever anything remotely bad happened.  
  
"Everything from that point onwards is still under review by Starfleet Intelligence, and, as such, remains under Priority Red classification. The implications of this phenomenon are, of course, astounding. The effects could have on an otherwise reasonable being can easily be shown by Dr. Tolian Soran's obsession with the Nexus, an obsession that eventually led to insanity. Suffice it to say that Soran's plan did not succeed, thanks to extraordinary heroism in the face of fire.  
  
"And that is the end of this report. You will receive further details as other incidents become declassified. Thank you for your time." Picard's face disappeared from the screen as the tape wound itself to a stop.  
  
"My God," whistled Beddoes, sliding the precious disk into his desk drawer. "No wonder this thing was classified..."  
  
And if Sarevok's memory hadn't faded over the years and the Hyperion really had been exposed to this "Nexus," the admiral and everybody on board his ship would be in very deep shit by now.  
  
"Communications," he said into the intercom, "Get me a channel to Admiral Forester at once." Almost immediately, he amended that statement. "A secure one."  
  
"That will take some time, Captain," his communications officer warned. "We've got listening posts all over this sector."  
  
"Do what you can. I'll be up there at once. Beddoes out."   
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
Listening Post 24601, Deep Space  
Primary Data Recorder  
1000 Hours  
  
After the reshuffling of Starfleet, responsibility for military intelligence was given to SciFleet technicians who were so disgusted by the shoddy condition of the Federation's sensor net that they wondered how espionage even got done when the gunslingers were in control. With the blessing of TacFleet admirals, the technicians were assigned a few ships and began to refit and repair the listening posts scattered across Federation territory. Priority was given to the Romulan Neutral Zone and outlying colonies, followed by critical trade routes and military bases and outposts; and as a result LP-24601was one of the last on that list. The modifications had been completed only a few days ago and the new location of the listening post would only be transferred to TacFleet databanks after the technicians finished the final leg of their mission.  
  
But LP-24601was definitely online.  
  
Its finely tuned sensors picked up a faint reading from a ship it identified as the USS Ffestinog. Instantly, it cut through the TacFleet encoding, broke into the link and sent a copy of the transmission to any SciFleet ship in range for review. Anything else would eat static.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Peacekeeper-A, Holding Escort Position  
Bridge  
1000 Hours  
  
"Sir!" Lieutenant Borodin bolted upright in her chair at the communications console. "We're picking up a broadband transmission coming from an unregistered sensor station somewhere in the vicinity. I can't pinpoint the location exactly--too much interference. But it's definitely a Federation signal. I should be able to hack it, but..." She gave S'Taelh a puzzled look. "Somehow it's not accepting any of my access codes."  
  
"Sound Yellow Alert," said the Vulcan immediately. "Signal the Hyperion that we are moving to investigate and will rendezvous as soon as possible."   
  
"Hyperion acknowledges, sir. They report they are having engine trouble and are slowing to warp six point four until the problem is cleared up."  
  
"That is unfortunate. Helm, plot a course to the listening post as quickly as you can. I want to be back here before anything else happens."  
  
As the Peacekeeper turned away from its course, S'Taelh couldn't help wondering why routine diplomatic escort missions would always get so...complicated.  
  
  
Bridge  
1036 Hours  
  
"Entering the sector now," reported the helm officer. "You should be able to pick up the signals loud and clear now."  
  
S'Taelh glanced over at Borodin, who looked back helplessly. "Still static, sir. If this was a Federation signal I would be able to decode it but the computer doesn't seem to recognize the frequency. We might have to consider the possibility that this is a probe droid planted by, say, the Romulans."  
  
The lieutenant commander flinched at his officer's accusation. That had always been a sore point. "Sensors at maximum," he ordered sharply. "Let's see if they tells us anything."   
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
Listening Post 24601, Deep Space  
Main Computer  
1036 Hours  
  
The computer had been set to activate once it detected signs of hostile intrusion and now it whirred to life, its mechanical mind quickly analyzing the situation. An unknown scanning frequency was sweeping the area, one that, while definitely not up to SciFleet standards, did have the potential to break into its archives.  
  
Its programming took over from there. An emergency message flashed through subspace almost instantaneously, and three milliseconds later a command was sent to the safety fuses planted on each one of the listening post's four solar panels--deactivating the force field surrounding the antimatter battery.   
  
A few milliseconds more and all that was left of LP-24601 was a rapidly expanding cloud of dust.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Peacekeeper-A, Deep Space  
Bridge  
1036 Hours  
  
S'Taelh let loose a dreadful Orion expletive. "Helm, get us out of here before we're detected. If Starfleet finds out about this they're going to court-martial and drum us out of the service."  
  
"Not if they don't find us." The helm officer turned to the console, a grim smile on his face. "Heading back towards the Hyperion--"  
  
The captain tightened his grip on his chair. "I think it's too late for that," he said. "See that?" What was unmistakably the outline of an Federation cruiser had appeared on the screen--and approaching quickly.  
  
His science officer looked frantic. "I couldn't pick up anything with my scanners just a second ago!?!" he said, gesticulating madly towards his screen. "Only ships with transwarp drive could respond to a distress call that fast!"  
  
"Check the data registry. USS Talaria, NX-26781. A transwarp testbed, armed and operational."  
  
"Well, whoever they are they're hailing us!!" shouted Borodin as what was unmistakably the voice of a very angry SciFleet commander came through the speakers. "I'm trying to jam them--"  
  
Idiot. Now we can't be written off as some strange sensor anomaly. "Ops, engage the phase cloak and set a course for the Hyperion," ordered S'Taelh. "Maybe the explosion will mask our engine signature." Or maybe Kieran will pull some rank and save our asses before we get courmartialed out of the service.  
  
He would have been much more worried if he had known that the Talaria had just finished plotting an intercept course.   
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Ffestinog, En Route to System Vulcan  
Bridge  
1046 Hours  
  
Beddoes' face looked unusually serious as he finished outlining what he had gleaned from the stolen tape. "So basically you're carrying what could quite possibly be the deadliest weapon ever invented. And you think the holodeck is bad? Hell, what we're dealing with--it's the real thing."  
  
"But that's impossible! Everything on board this ship is real, I guarantee that!"   
  
"All the same, you'd better get it checked at a starbase. Who knows what else may be on that tape that Starfleet's not showing us--"  
  
All of a sudden, the sounds of a loud explosion filtered through the speakers, almost immediately followed by a rain of sparks that showered down on the Hyperion's bridge. Captain Beddoes' heart lodged itself somewhere between his mouth and his windpipe as he saw Admiral Forester go down.  
  
"Hold on!" he shouted before the visual lock shivered and disappeared entirely. "Helm! Maximum warp!"  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, En Route to System Vulcan  
Bridge  
1046 Hours  
  
Admiral Kieran Forester had been in charge of a starship long enough to know when a little jolt was a little jolt and when a little jolt would probably lead to the destruction of the ship. As he picked himself up from the floor, head reeling, he felt the rumblings of another explosion just seconds before it hit the ship. Kieran clutched madly at the railing and barely managed to avoid tumbling down again.  
  
"What the hell was that!?" he shouted above the din of the sirens, struggling to stay on his feet.  
  
"I don't know, sir, but that's some crazy shit that's happening--hold on, here comes another one--" The young science officer braced himself as another explosion ripped through the bridge. The science panel disintegrated in front of his horrified eyes.  
  
"Tell me what that crazy shit is!"   
  
"I've just lost my console, but as far as I can tell, it's some kind of warp core breach, energy surge in the phase cloak--wait--hull integrity's going down, sir! We're at 94%--wait, make that 83%--and holding, force fields are up but we won't be able to power them for long--"  
  
"Emergency decelerate!" the admiral ordered immediately. "Cut all power from our engines and activate our batteries!"  
  
"But sir, doing that at Warp Six could rip the ship to pieces!" protested the helmsman.  
  
"And you stay at Warp Six and the ship will rip itself to pieces!" Taking advantage of a momentary respite in the explosions, Kieran dashed across the bridge to the helm. "Do I have to do everything myself?" he snarled, and punched the command.  
  
For one agonizing second, the Hyperion's hull creaked and groaned under the stress of the maneuver. Kieran recoiled as the engines' dull hum rose in pitch to become an agonized howl, his eyes still locked on the helm officer's controls. The thin red bar on the bottom slowly faded to a pale yellow, and then to a bright green. All of a sudden, the engines abruptly stopped their humming and shut down.  
  
Kieran slumped in his seat as the helmsman reported in: "Maneuver successful."  
  
"Can somebody give me a casualty count?" the admiral called out weakly.   
  
The science officer gingerly touched his scorched console. "Not with this," he said, brushing off some ashes from his fingers. "As it stands now it won't even tell me if our engines are online."  
  
There was a crackle of static and the interim chief engineer's voice came through the intercom. "Admiral, we've got more than a few dead and wounded down here--would you mind giving us a hand?"  
  
The words "more than a few" sent an involuntary shiver down Kieran's spine. "Can you reach Sickbay?" he asked.  
  
"That's the problem. Communications down here have been cut, otherwise we'd let the CMO know about the way things stand. We've only just gotten to the AC dragging the injured, and I don't think they can make it very far."  
  
"I'll detail a medical team to your position right away."  
  
"All I need." The intercom clicked twice.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Peacekeeper-A, En Route to Rendezvous Point  
Bridge  
1046 Hours  
  
"At least we don't have to charge weapons," remarked S'Taelh wryly as he watched the distorted star lines flash by on the viewscreen. "A good thing about being pursued by a friendly vessel. Can we enhance the operation of our scanners with the excess power?"  
  
"Would that do anything for us, sir?" His science officer looked at him skeptically. "We can't see the side of a fucking barn while the cloak's running and we're at warp. Besides, whatever's after us would probably detect the scan and blow us to pieces."  
  
"Agreed. Albeit with less colorful language," said the captain. "Out of curiosity, then, how can certain unnamed denizens of the galaxy target things while cloaked?"  
  
"You're thinking about normal cloak, sir, which works far more simply. If you'd really like me to explain the physics--"  
  
"That will be fine, Ensign." S'Taelh made sure to cut him off before he could go any further. Once a scientist warmed to his favorite topic, it would be impossible to shut him up. "Do you detect pursuit?"  
  
"As I said, we can't see the side of a fucking--"  
  
"Ah." The Vulcan made a mental note to see if he could get a science officer without a mouth like a trooper. "ETA to rendezvous, then?"  
  
"At present speed..." The science officer glanced at the console. "Four minutes. We're close."  
  
S'Taelh nodded. Enough of the small talk, he upbraided himself. Life will start getting interesting if that starship's followed us.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, Holding Position  
Auxiliary Control  
1048 Hours  
  
CMO Caitlin Denning arrived minutes later to find Auxiliary Control turned into a makeshift hospital. Farrelly was on the comms again, giving Kieran a rundown on what was broken on the ship. "It would be quicker to tell you what's not broken," the interim chief engineer was saying--the standard response. "We're alive, but only just. One more hit and the entire ship will go to pieces."  
  
"Are the warp engines working?"   
  
Caitlin could sense the engineer's hesitation, and she reminded herself to get up to the bridge and prescribe something for high blood pressure after she was done here. "Well...they're not dead, I can tell you that."  
  
"Translation?"  
  
The engineer heaved a sigh. "That means we don't know, sir. The warp core's been restricted ever since the first officer was fried by the radiation and your ED has probably made it worse. We've been forced to evacuate all personnel. If there's something wrong, our detectors ought to be able to find it. The problem is, we don't know if our detectors are malfunctioning or not. We have to send somebody in there to check it out."  
  
There was a loud, uncomfortable silence on the other end. "Very well," the admiral said finally, his voice barely audible even amplified by the speakers. "I'll go check it out. Keep me posted on developments, Lieutenant. Kieran out." At that, Auxiliary Control broke into a cacophony of shouts and exclamations.  
  
Caitlin struggled to be heard above the din. "How long?" she asked Farrelly.  
  
"With the radiation in there? I don't think he'll last for thirty minutes--much too short a time to find the leak."  
  
"Oh, shit," she muttered. Then, without another word, she grabbed a stim from her pack and started to shoulder her way through the crowd.   
  
"That won't work," shouted Farrelly. "You'll have to incapacitate him, not poison him!"  
  
Caitlin turned back with resignation. "Who said I'm going to even touch him?"  
  
The doors hissed shut moments later, but she could see the horrified look on the engineer's face nonetheless.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Peacekeeper-A, Holding Position  
Bridge  
1050 Hours  
  
The counter on the tactical officer's panel flashed 4:00 in bright red letters as the Peacekeeper's warp engines shut down. "All stop," called S'Taelh.  
  
"Aye, sir. All stop," echoed the helmsman. Seconds later, the sublight engines were shut off as well, leaving the massive Sovereign dead in space.  
  
"Anything?" S'Taelh turned expectantly to his science officer.  
  
"We have ourselves a reading," he replied, brows furrowed. "But that's all. There's a ship out there, and I'd be willing to bet it's the Hyperion. A bit off course, as far as I know, but that's the best I can give you."  
  
"So what's the problem?"  
  
"There's another ship on our sensors, right where the Hyperion ought to be but apparently isn't. We would have hit it if we hadn't stopped when we did."  
  
S'Taelh started. "Could the Talaria have arrived before us?"  
  
The helmsman snorted. "At transwarp? It could make it to Sol and back in less than a day. If we had one of those babies..."  
  
"So we're effectively blind."  
  
"That is correct."  
  
"And there's no chance for a deep scan?"  
  
"Then we'd just reveal ourselves, and whoever's in charge of the Talaria won't be very happy to see us. It's cat-and-mouse, sir, if I may draw the analogy. The question is, do we want to be the hunter or the hunted?"  
  
"An apt analogy," said S'Taelh approvingly. "So tell me, Mister Anderson--how do you say to being felines today?"  
  
Slowly, a wide grin spread across the science officer's face. "You son of a bitch!" he shouted exultingly, and then went to work.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, Holding Position  
Engineering  
1050 Hours  
  
Visions flitted through the admiral's head like butterflies as he silently stepped into the bulky suit which he knew wouldn't protect him from the radiation inside.  
  
FLASH.  
  
"Good. Learinton, make your course 053 mark 12. Hunter, set speed 31 and prepare for high energy turn." Both lieutenants muttered their assent and made the inputs on their consoles.   
  
"David, ready torpedo launchers. Fire only on my command." On the screen, the behemoth passed beneath them.  
  
"Execute HET! 180 degrees!" The Hegemony's rear starboard side loomed in the viewscreen. "Torpedoes only! Fire!"   
  
Four torpedoes tore into the weakened shield at point blank range. The third knocked out the shield, and the fourth impacted on unshielded hull.   
  
"Set phasers to pulse fire, target aft weaponry and drone defense systems! Fire!" Crimson phasers, one blast after another, lanced into more unprotected sections on the Hegemony's hull.   
  
"Drone racks, launch!" Two blazing missiles zipped away from the Hyperion--  
  
FLASH.  
  
--and into an old listening post decommissioned for 'testing duty.' It erupted in a satisfactory flash of flame as the two missiles slammed into its midsection. Kieran frowned.  
  
"Lieutenant, why didn't the other rack fire?"  
  
The lieutenant squinted at the console. "Sir, it looks like the number two rack jammed again. The engineers are working on it, but both racks will have to be taken offline."  
  
Kieran growled. "All right then, let's move on to the photon torpedoes. Torpedo launcher status?"  
  
"Four of the launchers are fully loaded and ready to fire."  
  
"Four? This ship has six photon tubes, what's wrong with the other two?"  
  
The lieutenant again checked his console. "Commodore, the auto-loader mechanisms on tubes three and four are not functional. They will have to be loaded manually."  
  
Kieran sighed. "And how long will that take?"  
  
"About three times as long as--"  
  
"Sharia, get me--"  
  
FLASH.  
  
"--intraship!"  
  
"Aye, sir. Channel open."  
  
The commodore cleared his throat ceremoniously. "This is Commodore Forester speaking. Starfleet has sent me the orders for this mission. They tell me to distribute them on a need-to-know basis, with all that kind of bureaucratic bullshit. Well, I think you all need to know.  
  
"We're on a top-secret mission to rescue an old ambassador from the Romulans. If we fail, nobody will know. Supposedly, we will have encountered a strange anomaly and disappeared without a trace. And if we succeed, we'll get no recognition whatsoever. So we're risking it all for nothing that can be put on paper.  
  
"I will drive you harder than you've ever been driven before. I'll force you to do all sorts of seemingly useless tasks. You'll do them. And when you're done, I won't pat you nicely on the back and give you a commendation. I'll scream my ass off and tell you to do it again. You think the guys at the Academy were tough? I used to teach at the Academy. I'm tougher.  
  
"But when we're all done with this mission, we're going to get into the biggest goddamn bar this side of the galaxy and I'll buy you all a drink. First, though, we need to survive. And to do that, you'll have to listen to me. Is that clear?"  
  
Kieran hoped that the crew was nodding.  
  
"Good. That is all." He closed the channel and lay back on his bed, seeing--  
  
FLASH.  
  
The crew of the Hyperion and the Peacekeeper. He felt himself break down as a vacant coffin, draped with the flag of Starfleet, passed him on the parade grounds of Starfleet Academy. An empty grave, he thought. And all the technology of my ship couldn't save him...  
  
Twenty-one fighters shot above the skies of San Francisco. One of them peeled away and screamed downwards towards the Academy. It recovered at the last minute, soaring back upwards to rejoin its squadron. A tribute to a fallen officer.  
  
Twenty-one guns fired in simultaneous salute as the coffin was carried into the cemetery. Various admirals began to speak, but Kieran found himself suddenly uninterested.  
  
"What's wrong?" Ryan Laskir, wearing a somber expression on his usually blithe face, walked up to the him.  
  
"I--I--well, I don't know--it all just seems so trite, so useless..."  
  
"Come on, now," he said quietly. "He gave his life for us. You call that useless?"  
  
"Well--"   
  
"I've known him for around sixty years and I still don't think I can understand him. But suffice it to say that he did his duty--to us, to you, to Starfleet."  
  
FLASH.  
  
"We used to be like him," Kjolgaard said quietly, his hand never leaving his captain's shoulder. "Remember the time we snuck into Professor Fischer's lab and replaced the stuff in his test tubes with sugar water?" He chuckled. Almost got us kicked out of the place, but we weren't. We were too good. But now, now, now...it's all different. Look at this around you." The first officer picked up the book and brushed some dust off of the cover. "If you had told Admiral Moore that a hundred years later people would be able to recreate the past he would have sent you to the funny bin."  
  
Kjolgaard sighed. "It's past our time, Kieran. We can put on new uniforms and command new ships but you know as well as I do that they're just idle pretensions. Let the new generation take over now. Let them replace the stuff in your test tubes with sugar water. It'll almost get them kicked out of the place but they won't be. Since they're too good. We're just old graying relics of antiquity, my friend. Just let go..."  
  
FLASH.  
  
"Kieran!"  
  
A clarion call through the fog, bursting through the dark shadows like bright sunlight--  
  
"Kieran!"  
  
Caitlin Denning rushed up to him and ripped off his helmet. "Oh my god," she screamed. "Kieran! Answer me! Kieran!"  
  
He stared at her for a second, her form wavering in his field of vision. His mouth tried to form a word, any word, but it wouldn't respond.  
  
Sobbing hysterically, she fumbled for a hypo and stabbed it into his arm.  
  
Spasms of pain shot through his nerves, and he screamed and hollered at the top of his lungs that he wasn't dead, that he was still alive--  
  
Then.  
  
Darkness.  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Peacekeeper-A, Holding Position  
Bridge  
1051 Hours  
  
S'Taelh braced himself in his chair as his science officer powered up the scanners. "Anything?" he asked tensely.  
  
"Can't tell at this range," the officer cursed, and delivered a hard kick to his console. "Can we get in closer?"  
  
The helmsman looked at him questioningly. "Sir, that will probably reveal our--"   
  
"Do it."  
  
He shrugged. "Very well. Accelerating to one-quarter impulse." The two ships on the viewscreen started to solidify into coherent images, a far cry from the churning white eddies they had been moments earlier.  
  
"Anything?"  
  
"Just a little bit more...they haven't detected us yet...just a little bit--" And then, suddenly: "Weapons launch! Weapons launch! Four--wait, make it six--six drones from the ship in the rendezvous point, set to disable! In phase cloak, we have no shields--"  
  
"Helm, evasive!" shouted S'Taelh immediately.  
  
"I can't safely do anything, they're closing fast--"  
  
"Now would be a good time to get us out of here!"  
  
"Well, I could try the Picard Maneuver...Brief acceleration to warp, then back to impulse--"   
  
"I know what the goddamn maneuver is! Do it before those drones hit us!"  
  
Taking a deep breath, the helmsman activated the warp engines, jumped to Warp Two, and then decelerated to impulse immediately.  
  
S'Taelh had just breathed a sigh of relief as the drones swerved to hit the mirror ship or were destroyed by the warp field when there was a sickening crunch.  
  
The Peacekeeper had collided with the Hyperion.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, Holding Position  
Engineering  
1051 Hours  
  
Like all Starfleet officers, Caitlin was trained to deal with life-and-death situations in a calm and steady manner, but now she fumbled in her medical pouch with increasing panic. The corridor lights exploded one by one around her, plunging the entire deck into darkness, lit only by the eerie throbbing of the alarms. Through the mental haze that threatened to envelop her Caitlin still recognized them. Collision, she thought dully. And then: "Mary sweet mother of God..."  
  
Hull breach!!  
  
She began to tug Kieran's limp body--still encased in the bulky radiation suit--away from Engineering. "Give me some help here," she pleaded, her breaths becoming shallower in the thinning air. There! There was the airlock, a mere twenty feet ahead of her. But the sudden loss of oxygen was too much. With one last helpless look at her commander, she sank lifeless to the ground.  
  
The sirens were still wailing.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Peacekeeper-A, Holding Position  
Bridge  
1052 Hours  
  
S'Taelh held on for dear life as his ship shuddered around him. "What did we hit!" he shouted as the science officer struggled to stabilize the deflectors. Luckily for them all, the Peacekeeper sported top-of-the-line shielding that had allowed it to survive the near-fatal collision. But only just.  
  
"The only other thing in the system!" the science officer shouted back. "The Hyperion got knocked off course by an explosion in their warp core--"  
  
"--so their shielding's offline," finished S'Taelh. Shit! "Bridge to McClellan, come in, come in."  
  
The transporter officer's voice filtered through the comms. "McClellan here," she said, panting slightly, and only then did S'Taelh realize that she was off-duty during the shift.  
  
"Damage to systems?"  
  
"Engine's shot up pretty bad, but the transporters should still work."  
  
"Get a lock on the Hyperion's personnel and beam them on board before it blows--"  
  
"Weapons launch! Weapons launch!" interrupted the science officer. "Two drones, targeting our auxiliary power, set to disable!"  
  
"You hear that?" growled S'Taelh. "Hurry up!"  
  
"I can't get a lock! They seem to be melting in and out of realspace, I'm trying to compensate--"  
  
The intercom abruptly cut off as the ionic discharge from the drones' warheads reached the power core. All aboard the Peacekeeper, critical systems ground to a halt. They were disabled.  
  
S'Taelh reacted instantly. "Everybody out!" he yelled, pushing his bridge crew towards the turbolift and sealing the doors. With any luck it would withstand the pressures of a vacuum long enough for the Talaria to rescue the officers inside.   
  
Strapping on a EVA suit locked inside emergency storage, he lifted his phaser and began blasting a hole through the top of the bridge. Here goes nothing, S'Taelh thought to himself, and launched himself towards the stars.  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Hyperion-C, Holding Position  
Outer Engineering  
1054 Hours  
  
The Hyperion's hull was badly pockmarked and punctured, S'Taelh could see, and he directed himself towards one of the larger breaches. The faint glow of his repulsors was the only light in the corridor as he touched down. His magnetized boots locked themselves to the floor with an inaudible clank  
  
S'Taelh crept forward slowly in the darkness until a little beep from his helmet's computer told him that it had found what he was looking for. Whispering a prayer to whichever god held the Hyperion in its good graces, he hit a button on the side of the wall. A gauzy blue force field shimmered into existence and sealed the deck from vacuum. The deck automatically began repressurizing.  
  
Finally, thought S'Taelh with more than a little relief. First time anything went my way today.  
  
Deactivating his magnetic boots, S'Taelh strode past the cold, frozen corpses of those unlucky enough to be here when the collision occurred and into the inner bowels of the ship. Maybe there were still some survivors.  
  
  
Engineering  
1056 Hours  
  
The first thing Kieran sensed as he opened his eyes was that he could breathe again. I'm alive! was the first thing that went through his mind. And then he began to take in lungful after lungful of full, sweet, refreshing air as he closed his eyes once more.  
  
FLASH.  
  
"Kieran!" Caitlin's voice rang loud and sharp in his ear, and when he looked up he could see her right there in front of him. "Oh god, I thought you were--"  
  
FLASH.  
  
"--dead!" Her feminine features suddenly melted into what was unmistakably S'Taelh's angular face. "We have to get you inside before the temporary force--"  
  
FLASH.  
  
"--field is breached!" Caitlin grunted as she struggled to raise the admiral from the ground. "Just in here! Not very far to go,--"  
  
FLASH.  
  
"--not at all...give me some help, Admiral. Can you stand up?" S'Taelh picked Kieran up and braced the admiral against his sturdy frame. Together, they hobbled towards the--  
  
FLASH.  
  
--door to the warp core, and Caitlin held the admiral upright as she opened it. Together, they stumbled inside and fell on the ground, panting, when--  
  
FLASH.  
  
Kieran stared from one to the other. Caitlin and S'Taelh, S'Taelh and Caitlin. Doing exactly the same thing, but two different people nonetheless. Their voices melded together, their bodies, becoming one for a single infinitesimal moment and then splitting again.   
  
FLASH.  
  
S'Taelh laid the admiral down gently but couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right. He whirled around to see the warp core offline and the phase cloak generator pulsing purple--  
  
FLASH.  
  
--and red and orange and green and yellow, then a blur, shifting colors so fast that it stretched across the entire room and then beyond so Caitlin found herself dizzy. Bolts of pure energy crackled around it, out of it--  
  
FLASH.  
  
--and finally, something occurred to Kieran--Commodore Caitlin Hope Denning had been killed at the Battle of San Paolo while she was serving on board the medical cruiser Salvation--  
  
FLASH.  
  
"Come on, Admiral!" S'Taelh's voice bore a sense of urgency now. "I need to get you out of here before radiation exposure kills us--"  
  
FLASH.  
  
The Nexus! realized Kieran. An alternate reality where your deepest wishes can come true!  
  
FLASH.  
  
"--like it killed Boris and Dane!" Caitlin took hold of his hand and tried to drag him away from the crackling energy ribbon--  
  
FLASH.  
  
The words of Dane Kjolgaard came rushing back to him..."Just let go..." Kieran repeated quietly. "Let go..." Richtofen, Kaisen, S'Tasik, Dane...all of them seemed terribly far away, and yet they were right above him, shades of a time past diving in and out of his thoughts, sending a chilling numbness down his spine--  
  
"Let go..."  
  
...his friend for nearly a century, loyal companion and officer, there when he needed her the most...the next generation of captains, young, brave, and unbelievably stubborn like his father, the future of Starfleet...  
  
"Let go..."  
  
Ghosts swirled around him. He could have back the past, make wrong the mistakes, but it would all be false, it would all be an illusion...Caitlin Denning beckoned, and he ran forward to her...   
  
"Let go..."  
  
...grabbed her in his powerful arms. With a last long look at her beautiful face, he threw her into the writhing inferno and covered his eyes as her face contorted in agony, green eyes running together with blazing red hair, her form liquefying until she became energy herself.  
  
The strands of the Nexus came together as one, forming a brilliant pillar that rose up from the Hyperion's engine room and leapt into space. And with a final FLASH, it was gone...  
  
  
---------------------------------------------  
USS Ffestinog, Holding Position  
Bridge  
1100 Hours  
  
"Oh, Jesus," moaned Captain Beddoes. "We've missed the action again." 


	7. Epilogue

=/\= Epilogue =/\=  
  
---------------------------------------------  
San Francisco, California  
December 24th, 2381  
2300 Hours  
  
Kieran stepped outside onto S'Taelh's patio, feeling the cool sea breezes whip past him. There was a Christmas party going on full blast inside as the Vulcan's shipmates broke out another jug of champagne, but he had refused. He thought it would be hard enough to face the phantoms of the past as it was. He didn't need alcohol to weaken him further.  
  
"A penny for your thoughts, Admiral?" S'Taelh had appeared behind him with almost no sound at all, holding two glasses in his hands.  
  
Kieran shook his head. "Not going to drink anymore tonight. I've had enough."  
  
Shrugging, the Vulcan put the glasses on a nearby table and went to join him in staring upwards at the skies.  
  
"They're really something, aren't they?" the admiral said. "The same stars that I showed you back on the Hyperion." His voice was distant, a mere echo that flitted away into the night. "I'm old," he murmured. "It's been a hundred-odd years since I first stepped on the bridge of a ship. I've seen war, I've seen death, I've seen everything this whole fucking galaxy can throw at me. It's past my time, S'Taelh. Way past my time."  
  
"You mean to retire."   
  
The admiral nodded, but there was something in his eyes--  
  
"You can't, can you?" S'Taelh looked evenly at him. "You want to go back up there, to seek out the only things that can withstand the ravages of Time..."   
  
Kieran started. "How'd you know?"  
  
And finally, the Vulcan understood. "Are you not human?"  
  
---------------------------------------------  
  
And above them, far above them, the stars, the sentinels, silent and sure, stand watch in the night...  
  
The stars still shine...  
  
  
  
FINIS 


End file.
